How to Adopt Scrum: A Better Approach to Project Management

The Sprint Review

The Sprint Review occurs—without exception—on the last day of the Sprint. Here, the Scrum Team and Product Owner have an opportunity to reflect on progress toward current release goals. It also represents another "inspection point" in Scrum's ongoing inspect-and-adapt cycles. It is not a milestone or deliverable, although what is being inspected probably constitutes both.

During the review, the team demonstrates the functionality developed and the Product Owner accepts or rejects the results based on previously established acceptance criteria. In addition, the team and Product Owner, with the ScrumMaster facilitating, review progress to date and adjust plans in light of emerging conditions.

The Sprint Retrospective

The Sprint Retrospective is the last Scrum meeting, concluding every Sprint. It is an opportunity to reflect on the quality and effectiveness of the team's processes and propose adjustments. It occurs immediately after the Sprint Review and focuses on strategies for continuous improvement. It is important that the team reflects on how it’s been working so that it can implement improvements going forward.

A final thought

Transforming an organization with Scrum is much more than just about changing people's titles and renaming meetings. The challenge involves literally learning to look at how work gets done differently. It's a radical shift in considering how work is managed and one that will be necessarily disruptive, but the results Scrum yields will be equally radical.

Jimi Fosdick is a Certified Scrum Trainer at Danube Technologies. Jimi conducts dozens of public courses around the world each year, helping organizations to surface dysfunction and improve processes through Scrum. Before joining Danube, Jimi spent four years advocating agile approaches to project management—first as a program and project manager, and later as an independent agile and Scrum consultant. During this time, Jimi worked with companies such as CIBER, Razorfish, MTV Networks and Microsoft, helping them transform to more agile ways of working using Scrum.

Prior to these consulting engagements, Jimi spent a decade working in various capacities in software, including as a program manager of software product development and solutions architecture at the Riverside Publishing Company and as a senior staff developer at Polycom. Jimi is a PMI-certified PMP and received his MBA in Project Management from Keller Graduate School of Management. As an undergraduate, Jimi studied mathematics and computer science at Loyola University. He can be reached at jfosdick@danube.com.