Scrum Basics week 3 journal

 This week, your team developed a Burn-Down Chart. In your journal, discuss the following:

• What went well this week?
• What challenges did you face this week?
• What can you do to improve team performance next week?
• How can you apply Scrum principles in your professional life?

Your journal entry must be between 600 to 900 words. Though APA formatting is not required, it is important to cite any resources you may have used in APA Style. Submit in Waypoint as an MS Word document.

What went well: The walkthroughs for the burn-down chart were pretty thorough, and allowed Damien to get a really good start on making the chart in Excel. Then, Peter had the bright idea to get the chart into a shared document format using OneDrive, so we could all work together on the document in real-time, without worrying about who had been the most recent one to make an updated version. The team really took the initiative this week and dove right into the assignment, before I was even really up-to-speed on what was being asked of us! 

What went not-so-well: The instructions made a huge leap from 10 tasks to 24 tasks, without clarifying where those extra 14 tasks should be coming from, or what they should be about. When we needed clarification and elaboration from our Product Owner, Dr. Parikh was again nowhere to be found. I know these assignments are just busy-work to get us some practice for how to use the concepts we’re learning, but without the context of actually having this many tasks, and how long they should be taking, it leaves much to be desired for me. 

Room for improvement: To improve team performance next week, I may try to reach out to Saul earlier in the week, since for the past two weeks he’s failed to pipe in until the very last minute. I’m also looking ahead to see what next week’s assignment is, in order to better prepare for it. From what I can see, there is no team assignment next week. So the next team assignment is in Week 5. It looks like we’ll be preparing a PowerPoint presentation together, which should be fun. To improve our performance right off the bat, I plan to start us off with a OneDrive slideshow, so we can work on it in real-time from the get-go. 

Practical uses: This question is the same as it was last week (and the week before that). Nothing about Scrum or my professional life has changed in the span of two weeks. So my answer remains the same: 

My professional life does not currently have any context for Scrum, as my current role works on a day-to-day performance to judge our metrics. We don't have any projects to implement at my current job grade. In the future, once I finish my degree and transition into a Software Development role, I anticipate that this will change, and these Scrum principles will be much more relevant. In the meantime, I can foresee these being useful in the context of my roles on staff for various conventions, using each year's convention as the scope of a single project. 

 

I noticed that the word requirement for this week’s journal has doubled in length, even though we’re still answering the same four questions as the previous two weeks. My apologies, but I couldn’t think of anything more to say.