Scrum Team Best Practices – Organization, Communication and Documentation

Organization

• SharePoint Documents and Folders, SharePoint search techniques.

• Confluence wiki structure

• Teams/Slack/Zoom group organization

• Windows Favorites organization and folders organization.

• Outlook folder organization, search techniques, Teams Pin options.

• Daily tasks list and tracking, as simple as excel or windows tasks, sticky notes

• Contacts along with cell numbers and time zones, shift times

• Cross team dependency contacts, distribution lists in the sharepoint. So that team knows whom to contact for what help and what time? Who can be online? 

Communication

• Meetings with Agenda along with task ownership. So that the task owners can come prepared.

• Meeting Notes with actionable intelligence along with task owners and ETAs.

• mention the up coming personal vacations in the signature. So that team members can reach out for help before you go for the vacation.

• Ping in the Teams groups rather than email chains to get quicker response.

• When pinging to the client, always mention the ask. Not just Hi xyz. So that he/she can read the message and reply to you back even if you are offline.

• Crispy communication on the Scrum calls.

• Do not setup too many meetings. Team needs to have some focus productive time.

• Release a team member from the meetings as soon as their scope of communication is done. Keeping lot of un related team members will waste their time and dilute the seriousness.

• Constructive confrontation vs destructive – Use we/us rather than I/You

• Request the Product Owners come prepared

Documentation

• Maintain an onboarding document. So that new joiners can self onboard quickly.

• Project Documentation will help the new joiners to get up to speed on design. A lead do not have to spend much time with the new joiners. Just provide the documentation link.

• Record as much technical/design sessions as possible.

• Add lessons learnt. So that costly mistakes will not be repeated.

• Add Acronyms, URLs, locations to the documentation.

• Only have one source of truth. Multiple distributed locations lead to confusion.

• A wiki which is not updated is like a stopped clock. It shows the wrong time.