Scrum is a project management technique that is used to implement agile principles.

It breaks projects into small, discrete tasks that are transparent to the entire team, regularly checked for progress, measured by difficulty, and that can be managed both collectively and by the scrum master.

When done well, it helps teams increase their productivity without increasing their individual workload and improves predictability.

Scrum is an alternative to the more traditional method, waterfall planning, which is known for failing to predict project duration and cost.

Projects are accomplished by selecting groups of tasks for our team to focus on during each sprint. This process is coordinated on a scrum board (we use Trello for our board) divided into five columns:

Backlog | Up Next | Work In Progress | In Review | Completed

Our project begins by forming a backlog of relevant tasks.

While the backlog can and should be updated throughout the project, we attempt to create a thorough backlog at the start. Prior to the start of each sprint, everyone involved in the project can nominate tasks for the next sprint by moving them to the queue.

During the weekly call, the scrum master (typically the Operations Team Lead) will discuss the nominations with the nominator, the team, and the product owner and select which tasks to move to the sprint they are about to start.

As the team accomplishes their tasks, they move the card to the in review column. After the product owner reviews and approves tasks from the in review column, they move the task to the mission complete column.

• Active particiaption by the team during weekly calls is important, as this gives team members an opportunity to provide information that can save effort and minimize wasted time.
• We lose more output from rolling tasks than from undertasking.
• If a task can’t be completed in one sprint, it’s more than one task and needs to be broken up.
• Our tasks are project management focused. While we capture reoccurring tasks also, we need to focus the management aspects of scrum on accomplishing DEF’s big lifts, such as the annual conference or improving a national program.

This allows us to reduce our time lost rather than treating our Trello board like a to-do list.

• We use one week sprints that start and end during our weekly calls.
• Team workloads are managed by team velocity. Each task has a points assigned by the people responsible and accountable. The scrum master and team lead will track how many velocity points a team can handle in an average week, and use that to determine a team’s realistic workload for each sprint.
• We hold a Leadership Team Workshop once a quarter, during which we will develop or improve our backlog and review and update our scrum procedures.