Nikolaos Raptis
Sep 7, 2018 · 2 min read

It has several points I think which I would say are not so proper.

The first one is kind of cultural and specifically by using the word “resources” for the people.

The second is in “Absence of a member or two” paragraph. What implies is that you should not do planning if all team members are there. I’m not sure that’s always possible and shifting the date depending on that it’s not good either. What you can try is to have the planning middle week so you minimise the possibility of absences on Fridays and Mondays due to leaves.

Also it implies that there is an assignment to specific persons specific stories from the beginning and for all sprint. That’s not optimal since there is a better way to do an initial split of work for a few items and then whoever finishes moves to the next Open task seeking also collaboration/pairing with other team members if possible.

The third is about “Vague effort estimation” which you suggest, in order to do accurate estimation (forgetting obviously that it is an Estimation), the team members to spend time in the previous sprint to prepare searching for solutions to be ready on planing. This time is given already and it’s called refinements. Giving extra time to be more accurate in estimation is a waste according to Lean principles.

Finally about “Uneven Task Distribution” paragraph, you speak about splitting even the story points to team members. First of all, it makes no sense and again it implies that all work must be splitten from the beginning. That’s not optimal because a) most of the times cannot happen and if you try to do it using story points (which is something abstract) is wrong and b) the team should always explore the best way to finish the sprint goal which mean during work discuss, do pairing when necessary, involve more team members in order to find the right approach.

One last thing that I noticed is that you are always saying “to give to someone work/stories etc” which is against the Pull mentality of a scrum team and the equality of the Devs

    Nikolaos Raptis

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    Scrum Master, Agile Coach, Developer https://www.nikosraptis.com/

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