The Team Knows the Answer

I think every Scrum Master out there will agree that sometimes you encounter a situation or scenario that you don't know the answer to. Shocking! Here's the thing - it's OK not to know the answer.


In a recent sprint planning meeting we encountered a situation where the team literally ground to a halt during estimation. There was a dead silence as I searched my mental data bank for a solution to the situation. I didn't have one. Silence stretched out...


So one of my team members asks me "So Scrum Master, how do we solve this?"


And I replied "I don't know."


Seeing the looks of shock on the faces of the team was actually quite funny. So what happened?


After an uncomfortable silence I encouraged the team to come up with their own solution. A team member spoke up with a great compromise, the team quickly agreed, and we moved on!


There are several lessons here.


As an agile evangelist and/or Scrum Master, it's okay to tell the team you don't know the answer to something. Let them know we are all just people and sometimes we don't know all the answers.


In conjunction with that, encourage the team to come up with their own answers! Try saying things like, "OK guys, how do we resolve this and move on?" or "Alright then, how do we get past this for now? We need ideas!"


The team knows the answer. They just need to figure it out.

Physical Task Board

So is a physical task board required for implementation of Scrum? No. But it helps.


One of the things not mentioned in Scrum is the visualization of workflows. That's where the physical task board comes in. In my experience the team usually loves a physical board. It allows rapid estimation, tracking, and gives the team a sense of accomplishment when tasks are moved to "done".


It addition, they work as great "information radiators". In my current company, nobody was using a physical board even though Scrum was supposedly the methodology of record. I immediately put up a multi-sprint task board and within literally days the entire company knew what the project was, who was on the team, and could track value that we were delivering, sprint by sprint.


Now there is tons of stuff you can do with a board, I won't go into that now. And of course, there are other challenges as well. What about distributed teams? I will go into those aspects later, but for now take a look at a typical board design that I am currently using in my projects...

I will go into design, details, and how-to-use in upcoming posts.