Big Scrum

Extending Core Scrum
Hello, this is David Starr and welcome to Big Scrum. This course is all about taking the advantages of Agility through Scrum and extending them beyond the Development Team into your entire organization. You're probably watching this because you've had some success with Scrum or Agile practices and you want to take your company to the next level. If that's not the case, and you're not familiar with Scrum already, you might want to step back and have a look at the Scrum Fundamentals course, which you'll find in the Pluralsight library. For those who are ready to grow, your road ahead may feel a bit uncertain and this course tries to provide some tools for your toolbox in scaling Agility through Scrum to the rest of your organization. Now I take a fairly pragmatic view of Scrum in our first module, Extending Core Scrum. Hopefully giving you some assurance that Scrum and Agility can indeed scale. I'll also add that it doesn't need to be dogmatic to be successful. Let's have a look at our module backlog for extending core Scrum. Frist, we're going to see that it's really important to keep focused on our prime objective, rather than getting lost in all the minutia of getting all the practices perfectly. And a value focus should give you some nomenclature and language to use when talking with others in your organization about why we want to scale Scrum in the first place. Then we'll look at the extension points that the Scrum framework provides so that we can think about what extensions make sense for you in your context. Next we'll see what the impact of scaling Scrum has on the management structures in your organization. And finally, because it's such a core piece of how we're going to scale Scrum, we're going to examine the concept of Team of Teams, something that we'll revisit throughout the course.

Scaling Scrum Events
Hello this is David Starr. Welcome back to Big Scrum and this module, Scaling Scrum Events. Now so far in this course we've discussed how the different roles of people change, but what does this mean and how do they behave differently? You'll see these new behaviors in this module as we explore a deeper understanding of how Scrum roles take a more meaningful form when the Scrum events begin to change with scale. We'll see what provides that heartbeat and cadence of Big Scrum. If you're watching this course you probably know the events prescribed by Scrum well enough. You also probably know that things change dramatically at scale. We're going to visit each Scrum event in turn and see how it might morph, change or behave differently at scale. I'm going to try and stay away from prescriptive practices because those are easy enough to find on your own. Instead, we'll examine the forces on these events when many teams are involved and we'll look at some techniques others have used to successfully mitigate the friction caused by doing any form of software development at scale.

Scaling Scrum Artifacts
Welcome back to Big Scrum wherein this module we're going to talk about scaling with regard to Scrum's Artifacts. Now the artifacts of Scrum are those things that are typically implemented for use by the Development Teams and for the Product Owners that work with them. This module demonstrates how these same artifacts and the rules that govern them can scale to manage larger and more strategic initiatives. The discussion covers several techniques for how to scale backlogs and software increments across teams, projects, and departments. The Scrum framework, as defined in the Scrum guide, only describes three artifacts. And they are the Product Backlog, the Sprint Backlog, and then the increment of working software itself. But in this module we're going to take on two additional artifacts and make them honorary members of the Scrum artifact set. And those are the Definition of Done and the Sprint Goals. And this gives us an opportunity to talk about how they might behave and differ a little bit at scale.

Keeping Healthy at Scale
Welcome to our final module of Big Scrum, Keeping Healthy at Scale. In this module I'm going to include some topics that just didn't really quite fit in the previous modules, according to the way we structured the course. But that's okay, because achieving initial benefits with Scrum is the first challenge and you've been through what you need to do that. But the longer game is to sustain excellence by creating a culture of agility and ongoing improvement. This very quick module address how leaders use Scrum and Agile practices to move continually toward higher levels of performance throughout the organization over time. In this module we're actually going to talk about how to assess how you're doing. And determine somewhat empirically how things are going according to your goals and expectations. We'll talk about gathering data and what data to gather. We'll also look at this very unpleasant topic, sometimes it's time to call it what it is and let it go. What to do when it's time for a Scrum Team to disband. We'll look at the role of Communities of Practice, which are a special Team of Teams that will play a very important role in your Big Scrum success. And finally, we'll look at what it means to actually enable a culture in which innovation can thrive. With these topics in hand you'll truly be ready to succeed using Big Scrum.