“Have you ever read the Scrum Guide?” I often ask people who work in a Scrum Team or even are the Scrum Masters of the team. Less than half of them have read the Scrum Guide before.
The Scrum Guide 2020 is a 14-page guide. The authors wrote it so concisely that almost every clause is meaningful and essential to the implementation. The Scrum Guide is intentionally incomplete. It leaves holes for users to insert things to make themselves work better. As a result, it becomes difficult for people to fully understand the essence of Scrum, not to mention ESL like Hongkongers, who don’t usually read English.
As an Agile Coach in the company, I often teach the Scrum basics. I don’t teach colleagues like a school teacher word-for-word. As a picture is worth a thousand words, I built a concept map called the Scrum Concept Map.
The Scrum Concept Map visualises the relationship between each key concept. We can understand how these concepts interact and correlate by navigating the map. For instance: We can start from the Scrum Team. The Scrum Team consists of the Product Owner who creates the Product Goal. The Product Goal drives the Product Backlog, formed by the Product Backlog Items created by the Product Owner and the Developers. The Product Backlog drives the Sprint Goal, committed by the Developers and inspected by them during the Daily Scrum.
I teach during the Scrum basics class by transversing all the nodes in the Scrum Concept Map. I found it works much more effectively than reading through the whole Scrum Guide or presenting a set of lecture slides. The Scrum Concept Map also includes the message implicitly stated in the Scrum Guide and often asked by colleagues.
After the class, the team may print the Scrum Concept Map on the whiteboard. They can refer to this single-page map without reading through the 14-page guide whenever they need a refresh. They may also detach some concepts or relationships from the map and let others fill in the correct term. This fill-in-the-blanks version reinforces the memory and understanding of the Scrum and its message – edutainment!
Can you fill in the blanks?
Of course, My Scrum Concept Map is only a visualisation tool for quick reference. I would still suggest that people read the original Scrum Guide frequently for more insight. As always, finding better ways to deliver a product that satisfies the customers is more important than whether the team is strictly executing according to the Scrum Guide.