Agile Notes (No. 53)

Impact/Effort Grid

Hello all! Welcome new subscribers! Thanks for reading. We continue with Collaboration Explained by Jean Tabaka. Moving ahead to Chapter 15: Processing the Information.

This exercise will help you prioritize easy wins (“low hanging fruit”) versus the big, complex, ugly items. Putting the work into these categories will help facilitate discussions between the Team, Product Owner and Customer (if separate from the PO). This exercise will help you prioritize your backlog and Sprints/PIs. It will help everyone make better choices.

At the same time, as a Scrum Master and as any kind of leader, I will ALWAYS favor doing the “Easy to do and yields a major improvement” every time.

Teams need those early wins to gain momentum. New teams need early wins to set them on a positive path. Teams new to Agile/Scrum. Easy and early wins are a great way to learn to walk before you run. Every team will get stuck in quicksand every once in awhile. Even the most experienced teams. It happens. Stuff breaks. Priorities change. Sprints get busted. Estimates are wrong. Sometimes these things stack up and you find yourself in a Retrospective where everyone’s heads are down. People are depressed. They are lost in the wilderness.

Go get some easy wins. Even if they aren’t up next. Move the backlog around. Recognize the psychological importance and need for positive momentum to get a team back on track.

How about you? How have you prioritized items? How have you overcome dips in team morale?

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