Five steps for starting the Scrum project

April 9, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

Agile processes advocate not mixing promises with estimations. When doing any kind of promise an agile organization is better to base the promise on the historical performance and be explicit about the degree of confidence. That sounds quite a common sense, but how do you start a new project, if there is no team assigned yet?

Starting the project

The way of starting a project is naturally dependent of your organization realities and charter. Here is a way for starting the Scrum project that works for many organizations.

1. Initially somebody from higher management, possibly CEO or Vice President comes up with the initial idea and asks a [future] product owner to figure out how much it would cost and how long it would take.

2. The product owner stocks up the initial product backlog mostly on his own, possibly consulting with the specialists available.

3. After the initial backlog is ready, product owner borrows an existing team for a couple of hours long estimation session and gets the estimations together with a handle on the expected velocity range. If the initial product backlog happens to be not good enough, the estimation session can happen two or three times. The borrowing process naturally happens in a way that is organization dependent. Sometimes it is as simple as to ask informally a nearby Scrum Master working with a relevant team.

4. Product owner presents the initial estimations of the costs to higher management. If the project prospects seem good and project gets a "go" decision, product owner talks to [possibly another] Scrum Master and figures out what would be a good team for the project, who should be on the team, etc.

5. Once a team was assigned, the regular Scrum process starts with the new estimation session performed by the team that is actually going to work on the project.

Your experience

How do you start projects in your organization?

Photo courtesy of zhurnaly @ flickr

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