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#26. Dan Barber, from the Customery Crew, wanted to know what it would be like inside some of Neil’s scrum events. In Scrum Dynamics 26, Neil walks Dan through one of his recent ten-day sprints day-by-day from sprint planning on Monday morning to the sprint review two weeks later. Here’s how it went…Day One. Sprint planning is at 3pm for two hours on Monday afternoon. We finalise the sprint goal, determine and determine the sprint backlog. On Tuesday morning, we start work on any stories carried over from the previous sprint, one-point stories and spikes. The Dynamics 365 squads hold their daily scrums at 9.15am and 9.30am. On Tuesday morning there’s a showcase for our business stakeholders. Tuesday afternoon is our retrospective for the previous sprint.Day Two. We have a technical design session on Wednesday morning to finalise the technical designs for the more complex stories. In the afternoon the analysts run a storytime workshop to elaborate and estimate stories for a future sprint.Day Three. The first product owner review session is on Thursday afternoon. It’s an opportunity for the tester to demonstrate any completed features for the product owner’s acceptance (fingers crossed).Day Four. Applause in Friday’s daily scrum as the first few accepted stories are moved to done. We sometimes hold back on completing all the definition of done activities until the end of the sprint so that developers can get working on another story and let the testers start testing as early as possible.Day Five. Monday doesn’t have any scrum events so it’s a solid development day. I’d love to say we’re halfway through the sprint backlog when we’re halfway through the sprint, but we’re often still playing catch up.Day Six. On Tuesday morning, some of the developers have finished all the stories they forecast they would complete. They help other developers complete their stories, work on spikes, chores and bugs. We can bring stories in from the product backlog, but only if the development team agrees that we can get the story developed and tested before the end of the sprint.Day Seven. Our aim is to be dev complete on all story cards by the end of the day on Wednesday so that our testers have sufficient time to test all our stories and have them accepted by the end of the sprint.Day Eight. We’re helping the testers by responding to feedback. We don’t track bugs reported by the testers or product owner. Instead, we just fix them on the spot. Unless they are low priority and we don’t want to fix them in this sprint, or they were reported by someone outside the scrum team. If there aren’t any bugs, then we’re finishing definition of done activities and working on spikes and chores. We’re helping our devops engineer automate all our deployment tasks. We don’t want to have any manual deployment steps. So we automate everything using Atlassian Bamboo and Octopus Deploy. We also have another storytime workshop to elaborate and esitmate stories for a future sprint on Thursday afternoon.Day Nine. Thank goodness it’s Friday. There aren’t any sprint events today. We might run an ad-hoc design workshop on Friday morning to Support the showCONNECT🌏 Amazing Apps website🟦 Customery on LinkedIn🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn MY ONLINE COURSES🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps 🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps 📐 Estimating Business Apps Keep experimenting...

22 Apr 201924min

#25. Neil is attempting a little experiment with a short, single question episode on the Amazing Applications podcast and on Youtube. Let’s see if he can answer your questions about Scrum for Dynamics 365 in ten minutes or less.The question in this episode is from Ruan Kilian, a Dynamics 365 developer in Brisbane, Australia. Ruan asks,“Is it acceptable for a developer to prepare and write down the answers to the three questions and read them out at the daily scrum?”Listen in or watch the episode to find out why Neil think it’s perfectly acceptable but could be dangerous.If you’d like to ask me Neil question about Scrum for Microsoft Business Applications, click on the Send Voicemail widget on Customery.com or send a video to scrum@customery.com.Support the showCONNECT🌏 Amazing Apps website🟦 Customery on LinkedIn🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn MY ONLINE COURSES🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps 🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps 📐 Estimating Business Apps Keep experimenting 🧪-Neil

22 Apr 20198min

#24. Neil covers his top 10 antipatterns for Scrum roles in Dynamics 365 projects. An antipattern looks like a good idea to a situation you were facing but wasn’t the best option when you look back on it. Antipatterns are traps that we want to help others avoid. Here are Neil's top ten antipatterns for Scrum roles: Uncommitted product owner. If your senior project stakeholder is too senior, they usually won’t have the availability required to be a committed product owner. Find someone in the next level of the organisation and backfill their job so they can be a full-time product owner for your Dynamics 365 project. Committee of product owners. This antipattern often occurs when we’re implementing Microsoft Business Applications across several divisions. Don’t settle for a committee of product owners from the different divisions. Find one single product owner they can all trust. Otherwise you’ll get pulled in lots of directions. Overdriving product owner. Often product owners with a background in sales leadership use motivation techniques, such as setting stretch targets, that often don’t work with developers. Use their enthusiasm, vision and communications skills, but watch out for them becoming a backlog troll. Learn-as-you-go product owner. Most product owners in a Dynamics 365 project have never been a product owner before might never have worked on a project before. For the sake of your team, your users and your organisation you deserve product owner training, to read widely about product ownership and to work closely with your scrum master for coaching on the product owner responsibilities. Part-time scrum master. World-class sports teams don’t expect one of the players to coach the team. Great scrum masters might be able to coach two, possibly even three teams, but it’s a full-time role that shouldn’t be handed to one of your developers. Combined product owner and scrum master. The goals of the product owner and scrum master can occasional come into conflict. If the product owner wants to push the team hard to meet a release deadline but the scrum master wants to preserve a sustainable pace. Keep the roles separate to balance that natural tension and avoid a conflict of interest. Scrum monster. Every scrum master is familiar with the rules in the Scrum guide. And they’re familiar with agile software development technical practices. Great scrum masters know when to bend the rules, and how to make the most of situations when your team can’t follow the rules. Rookie scrum master. It can be hard for a lot of project managers to transition into the scrum master role. It requires a mindset sift into an agile way of thinking, and Neil recommends that project managers spend a year working in a scrum team before trying to coach the team as a scrum master. Sharing developers between projects. Sharing a developer between projects can appear to maximise their productivity, but it can drag down the throughput of the teams relying on that developer. If you can’t dedicate a developer to your Dynamics 365 project, then make mutually agreed commitments about when they will be available so that you can determine your capacitSupport the showCONNECT🌏 Amazing Apps website🟦 Customery on LinkedIn🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn MY ONLINE COURSES🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps 🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps 📐 Estimating Business Apps Keep...

22 Apr 201930min

#23. Neil and Dermot discuss when Microsoft Dynamics customers and partners should consider hiring a scrum master or agile coach for their project.What is an agile coach and how is this role different from a scrum master?A scrum master is a coach for the development team, the product owner and the organisation. Dermot reckons a scrum master can coach up to three teams.An agile coach focuses on coaching the organisation. The growth and agile mindset of the leadership team and the organisation’s digital transformation. An agile coach is familiar with many agile frameworks and tools in addition to Scrum. Some agile coaches also coach scrum masters as well as leadership teams. Dermot’s coaching both!Should Microsoft customers hire an independent scrum master or rely on their Microsoft partner to provide a scrum master for their Dynamics 365 project?Dermot’s advice is that smaller customers embarking on a single project should engage a Microsoft partner with a good scrum master, but if the Dynamics project is part of a broader digital transformation programme then an independent agile coach is a good investment.Should Microsoft customers hire an independent product owner?After a little consideration, Neil begins to agree with Dermot that an independent product owner can when the person is trusted by the client, knows the organisation well, and is given some time to ‘bed in’ to the project.Can Microsoft partners send their project managers to a Scrum training course and ask them to become a scrum masters on their next project?It’s a loaded question for Dermot! It’s tough for project managers to become scrum masters on their first Scrum project. The project manager won’t have a mentor to help them adopt Scrum. This will leave the project manager, the scrum team and the client short-changed.Neil partnered with another Microsoft partner organisation, CIBER UK, on his first Scrum project and they provided an experienced scrum master, Paul Fox, to coach the team through their first scrum project. Investing in outside help through your first Scrum project was a worthwhile idea.Having the get-up-and-go to just try Scrum without any coaching is risky but it can work. Nick Doelman is an example of a Dynamics 365 expert whose teams adopted Scrum without hiring an experienced scrum master to coach them through their first Scrum projects.What are the characteristics you should look for when hiring an agile coach or scrum master?Dermot asks scrum masters situational questions about examples of how to handle difficult team members, when they’ve displayed servant leadership, how they’ve helped product owners prioritise their epics, what metrics they track and what they do with those metrics.He’d ask agile coaches what’s the difference between an agile coach and a scrum master. What examples do they have of leading digital transformation programmes, how they have uplifted the capabilities of agile teams, and what agile frameworks they are familiar with and how they’ve leveraged them. And what other coaches do they follow and how do they keep their own experience up-to-date?Neil has seen scrum master candidates asked to facilitate a retrospective without eSupport the showCONNECT🌏 Amazing Apps website🟦 Customery on LinkedIn🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn MY ONLINE COURSES🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps 🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps 📐 Estimating Business Apps Keep experimenting...

22 Apr 201937min

#22. Some ideas turn out to be great ideas. Some ideas look like great ideas at the time but don't turn out so well in hindsight. Those are antipatterns.A pattern is a repeatable idea that solves a common problem, and should be adopted by others. An antipattern seems like an answer to a problem, but turns out badly and should be avoided by others.There are hundreds of Scrum antipatterns you’ll encounter as you embrace Scrum in your Dynamics 365 projects. In this episode, Neil highlights the top ten Scrum event antipatterns that he's witnessed in Dynamics 365 projects.Support the showCONNECT🌏 Amazing Apps website🟦 Customery on LinkedIn🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn MY ONLINE COURSES🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps 🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps 📐 Estimating Business Apps Keep experimenting 🧪-Neil

8 Apr 201925min

#21. Mark Christie, who specialises in Dynamics 365 for Field Service at eBECS, uses Azure DevOps (formerly known as Visual Studio Team Services). He’s from Perth, the ancient capital of Scotland. On 25 January he’ll be celebrating Burns Night where the haggis is introduced to the table with bagpipes. Dynamics 365 Saturday Scotland runs on Friday 25 and Saturday 26 January, and its speakers will also be piped into the room.Azure DevOps combines planning tools such as backlogs and boards, with development tools like source control and testing with operations features to help you compile and deploy your applications.Neil is enjoying the forecasting feature of Azure DevOps which helps you see how long a project might take given a set of product backlog items and estimated team velocity.Mark enjoys building Azure DevOps dashboards and that although it’s a large suite, users can use a single app, like testing, within Azure DevOps without knowing the other parts of it.Azure DevOps is free for small project teams up to five users. Paid plans start at US$30 per month for 10 users to $750 per month for 100 users. Visual Studio subscribers are free. Microsoft partners can choose whether to provide their own instance of Azure DevOps and invite their customers to join, or whether to join their customer’s instance of Azure DevOps.When they recorded this episode, neither Mark nor Neil knew there was an on-premise option of Azure DevOps available. There is. It’s called Azure DevOps Server 2019 and it’s the successor to Team Foundation Server.Mark outlines how he manages his product back in Azure DevOps. Mark uses tasks to manage the work required to complete user stories in his backlog whereas Neil doesn’t.Mark also reveals a cunning track: using hashtags to label items even more quickly than using the label feature.Mark and Neil share the different statuses they use to track how items move across their Scrum boards.Mark’s co-worker, Richard Harding, gets credit for how Mark’s team are using the Azure DevOps wiki feature to help stakeholders learn how to use Dynamics 365’s features.Finally, if you think Scotsmen are famous for being frugal with their money, Mark will pay you £1.25 for a $1 note.Mark’s blog: TheMarkChristie.co.ukMark’s LinkedIn profile: Mark ChristieMark’s Twitter page: TheMarkChristieSupport the showCONNECT🌏 Amazing Apps website🟦 Customery on LinkedIn🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn MY ONLINE COURSES🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps 🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps 📐 Estimating Business Apps Keep experimenting 🧪-Neil

5 Apr 201934min

#20. Seth Bacon and Neil catch up to discuss Scrum in the public sector.You can connect with Seth Bacon on LinkedIn and @SethTBacon on Twitter. Check out Seth’s blog/vlog, The Bacon Bytes, for Dynamics 365 administrators.Seth’s having success implementing Dynamics 365 in city, county and state organisations in health and human services.Seth and Neil discuss how to sell agile projects in public sector organisations, how to handle fixed-price, fixed-scope, fixed-timeline contracts and projects by encouraging the customer’s product owner to take control of prioritising the project scope and adopting an agile mindset.Support the showCONNECT🌏 Amazing Apps website🟦 Customery on LinkedIn🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn MY ONLINE COURSES🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps 🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps 📐 Estimating Business Apps Keep experimenting 🧪-Neil

5 Apr 201934min

#19. We’re on a mission to ensure every Microsoft customer and partner successfully implements Dynamics 365 using the Scrum framework.Do you have a question for the Scrum Dynamics podcast? Visit Customery.com and click on the Send Voicemail button to have your question feature on the show.Dermot and Neil discuss how to optimise Scrum teams on a Dynamics 365 project.Todd Mercer, from MD Financial Management in Ottawa Canada, asks “What to do motivate a team to operate at peak capacity for a long period of time? For enterprises that can’t afford a dedicated product owner or scrum master, what roles do you see pair up on a part-time basis?”Dermot and Neil discuss sharing the product owner, scrum master and developer roles. They also share our experience of keeping scrum teams interested and having fun on long-running projects by keeping things fun, letting them experiment, and get more involved in refining the backlog.Using the Dedicated-Time Model or Dedicated-Team Model (Scrum Field Guide by Mitch Lacey) for managing legacy systems while deploying Dynamics 365.Using a decision log to document design shifts from sprint to sprint in order to explain scope changes to your project sponsor and ask for the additional budget if you need it. Scope changes belong to the product owner, rather than the development team.Having T-shaped skills in developers and cross-functional skills in a development team to avoid resource constraints. Encouraging developers to broaden their skills and knowledge to improve the team’s overall velocity.Avoiding customisation conflicts by using a magic wand to indicate that you’re working on a commonly-used solution component. Using digital tools such as Skype or Teams and frequent conversations to keep each other up-to-date on what we’re doing.Working on very small scrum teams and large teams. Neil recounts his experience working as a one-person development team, and Dermot and Neil worked on a team with 18 people. The Scrum Guide says development teams should have 3 to 9 people, so are Dermot and Neil crazy?Should you split large teams into component teams and feature teams? Dermot is a fan of feature teams because they have the cross-functional skills to release an increment to production. Component teams can’t release their work into production, but Neil has seen a component team used successfully for systems integration work.How do you manage dependencies on resources outside your scrum team? When Dermot needs firewall changes performed by the networks team he lines up the request weeks in advance to ensure there are no blockers during his sprint when the firewall changes are needed. Neil has two of the infrastructure team embedded in his programme to help raise, route and escalate dependent requests outside of my scrum teams.Can a Dynamics team work with multiple product owners? Neil reckons they can when there is a product owner for each feature team in a scaled scrum project, but not when there is a committee of product owners. Dermot shares his experience of area and chief product owners.Support the showCONNECT🌏 Amazing Apps website🟦 Customery on LinkedIn🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn MY ONLINE COURSES🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps 🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps 📐 Estimating Business Apps Keep experimenting 🧪-Neil

4 Apr 201943min