Samuli Heljo | Agile project ramp up

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Agile project ramp up

published May 6, 2010

The current project I am participating started without ramp up and the whole team was brought on-site right from the beginning. Now, 2 months after the start, I feel that some kind of team ramp up would have been useful. We started the project without a real product backlog, architecture plan, wiki or bug tracker. First two sprints were pretty much filled with infrastructure work, initial architecture design, backlog work, and the “normal sprint 0 stuff”. Still I feel uneasy.

Do not get me wrong, our customer is really good and in my opinion, doing lots of things right. But I think that we would have been better off had the project been started only with a team member and a scrum master. Then say after 3 sprints, rest of the team would have been invited to the party. I feel that in the beginning there are too many obscurities to fully utilize whole team potential and unnecessary waste is generated.

Also, Scrum.org’s Scrum guide says:

The ScrumMaster works with the customers and management to identify and instantiate a Product Owner.

But for my current project, it was other way around.

One could argue that by inviting whole team from the start, each member will know project history from the beginning which will help them grasping social representations among other things. Also by ramping up the team, you will unintentionally divide the team to “old-timers” and “newcomers”, but that will hardly be a problem because team is still very much forming and open for the newcomer innovation. During ramp up period there would be time to get product backlog started and initial prototypes/mock-ups made.

What do you think, do you ramp up your agile projects?

Samuli @ 19:19 (No Comments)

tags: Process, Productivity, Scrum