Category: Scrum Team

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Scrum Team

Clean Grill

Photo by Evan Wise on Unsplash

I cleaned my grill after 2.5 years.

I followed the YouTube video on cleaning your grill

  • Clean the outside with soapy water and let it dry
  • Clean the removable elements with grill cleaner and dry
  • Clean the grime from the insides with grill cleaner and let it dry

It took me 45 minutes and the motivation was to have a clean grill for the family event the next day.

I also got a spare gas cylinder incase the gas ran out.

The grilling experience was amazing. There was no old fat burning from inside. There was no old grime smoking and changing the flavors.

Think about our Scrum teams for a moment

  • How often do we clean our team technical infrastructure?
  • How often are we just patching up technical debt with excuses?
  • How often do these old legacy fittings in our technical infrastructure leave a bad smell in our projects?

A “Grillmeister” friend of mine recommends these 3 kinds of Grill cleans:

  • Simple clean after every grill
  • Clean after 10 grills or 3 months (whichever comes earlier)
  • Deep clean before Summer

A “Scrum Master” friend of mine recommends these 3 kinds of Sprint cleans:

  • Retrospective after every Sprint
  • Retrospective after 10 Retrospectives or 6 months (whichever comes earlier) for OKR progress and Portfolio management
  • Yearly Retrospective for OKR setting and Portfolio shakeup

Do you keep a Clean Grill and a Clean Sprint?

Categories
Agile Scrum Team

Will your curtains hold?

Photo by Anaïs MURITH on Unsplash

Have you ever setup curtains yourself?

I did many years back.

I bought a very cool Bosch drilling machine with the hammer setting.

I bought screws and wall plugs.

I drilled a hole, put in the wall plug, screwed in the holders and mounted the curtains.

The first curtain came crashing down when my cat swung on it chasing mice.

The second curtain came crashing down when my young daughter gave it a swing.

I brought down the other curtains keeping in mind the safety of the people in the house.

I spoke to a friend and he told me three things:

  • The material you are drilling into
  • The kind of the wall plug you use
  • The length of the screw in relation to the height and weight of the curtain

When I understood that I was drilling into brick and the plaster was 1.5cm thick, I drilled a deeper hole, got a wall plug made for brick and screwed the curtains in right.

Now I can sleep peacefully below my curtains.

How about our teams?

  • What process are we trying to drill into them?
  • What experience and knowledge do the the team members that we are drilling have already and want to build?
  • What is the glue that keeps the team and the process together?
  • How deep in the process we drill?
  • Can the process hold up the size and scale of the team(s)?

Do you have answers to these questions?

When we have the answers we will sleep peacefully knowing well that our teams are ready to handle the challenges thrown at them.