Scrum Team Best Practices – Organization, Communication and Documentation

Organization

1. SharePoint Documents and Folders, SharePoint search techniques.
2. Confluence wiki structure
3. Teams/Slack/Zoom group organization
4. Windows Favorites organization and folders organization.
5. Outlook folder organization, search techniques, Teams Pin options.
6. Daily tasks list and tracking, as simple as excel or windows tasks, sticky notes
7. Contacts along with cell numbers and time zones, shift times
8. 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

1. Meetings with Agenda along with task ownership. So that the task owners can come prepared.
2. Meeting Notes with actionable intelligence along with task owners and ETAs.
3. mention the up coming personal vacations in the signature. So that team members can reach out for help before you go for the vacation.
4. Ping in the Teams groups rather than email chains to get quicker response.
5. 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.
6. Crispy communication on the Scrum calls.
7. Do not setup too many meetings. Team needs to have some focus productive time.
8. 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.
9. Constructive confrontation vs destructive – Use we/us rather than I/You
10. Request the Product Owners come prepared

Documentation

1. Maintain an onboarding document. So that new joiners can self onboard quickly.
2. 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.
3. Record as much technical/design sessions as possible.
4. Add lessons learnt. So that costly mistakes will not be repeated.
5. Add Acronyms, URLs, locations to the documentation.
6. Only have one source of truth. Multiple distributed locations lead to confusion.
7. A wiki which is not updated is like a stopped clock. It shows the wrong time.