8Evolving Scrum Practices

After the success of the festival and other projects, the work in the village grew. Fawzooz now had five teams, each with its own project, and he knew his way of working had to grow with them.

Uncle Saleh said the teams were like the market: every trader has his own shop, but the market has one day and one meeting time.

“A method that doesn’t change with the team dies.”

Tools that bring the teams together. Some members worked from faraway places and at different hours, so Fawzooz brought them together in an online meeting room, around a big digital whiteboard where they sketched their ideas together.

Scrum for five teams. Fawzooz left each team free to work its own way, and had the team leads meet once a week to coordinate wherever their teams’ work crossed.

A review that is an exhibition. He turned the end-of-cycle review into a small exhibition, where the villagers walked past the work and wrote their views on coloured slips of paper. The little girl wrote: “I want more colours!”

Two questions to measure the work. The team chose two questions to measure its work by: how many people engaged with what we made? And how much time and money did we spend? The young man objected: “We’re artists, not accountants!” But the two answers came to guide the team’s decisions and improve how it worked.

Design thinking with Scrum. Fawzooz brought design thinking into the teams’ everyday work, so the team understood problems more clearly, came up with more ideas and made its first prototypes faster.

Challenges and how they were overcome

Coordination gets complicated. As the teams grew, Fawzooz improved the coordination tools and the Scrum practices so that the big work stayed manageable.

Innovation stalls. A time came when the team kept repeating the same words at the morning meeting. So the next day they went out into the fields, each with a new question.

In these ways Fawzooz strengthened his teams’ ability to innovate and kept improving how the village works. And he said to himself: “The method serves us as long as we keep renewing it.”