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Three quick tips for the ultimate agile sprint review

Round off your sprint the right way and go into the next one a better team

Tip 1: Focus on results

When you kick things off it’s a good idea to compare what you planned with what you actually accomplished within the sprint. From there you can discuss how it was that you managed to achieve more than planned or less than planned. This promotes transparency and understanding between the team, scrum master and product owner. It also encourages stakeholders to offer you more help in avoiding any organisational issues.

Tip 2: Share the limelight

When talking through the work, it’s important that everyone gets a chance to say his or her piece about it. Too often one party (e.g. product owners) will dominate the stage, allowing no time for the team to receive crucial feedback. If possible, have customers or users present to give detailed feedback and measure your assumptions with the realities of the experience.

Tip 3: Show upcoming items

After the sprint review show and tell or product demo, take a quick look at the next items from the sprint backlog. This will prepare you for what’s in store and enable you to ask the following:

  1. what is going on in market?
  2. what are business priority changes?
  3. what is your competition doing?

Asking these questions ensures you have alignment with stakeholders and reduces risks and nasty surprises. While you’ll never eliminate all surprises, you can dramatically reduce the amount of risk by having insight of what’s around the corner.

I hope the video and tips above help you to improve your agile sprint reviews and follow the scrum framework (aka scrum methodology) more closely. Refer back to this page whenever you need a refresher. If you have any questions or topics you’d like me to cover, leave a comment below or send me a message through my website. Thanks for reading. See you next time!

Here’s the full transcript:

-Hi Georg here helping you unlock your team’s genius and welcome back to another episode in the power of three series, where I’m spending three minutes to share my top three encouragements to help you improve your practice with your team. In this episode we’re going to cover sprint reviews, show and tells, product reviews and those wonderful get togethers every year and of the planning iteration to look at the progress that you have made, creating more value in your product or service. Now let’s put three minutes on the clock. Alright. so, the first thing I’d like to encourage you to pay good attention to, are your results. When you start the review, share what was planned and what was accomplished with the rationale of how come you might have managed to achieve more than your planned or how it came about that you have achieved less than your planned. Okay. And this provides more transparency and could potentially solicit the support of stakeholders to even help you avoid any snags that are due to organizational impediments in the future. So it’s quite important to start off with a recount of the plan for the duration and then share how the team and everyone has been doing compared to the plan and attention to results also has very strong positive impact on developing good team dynamics over time. The next thing I’d like to encourage you to pay good attention to is as you do the review to share the stage and get feedback. I have seen that in some sprint reviews and some product reviews that it was either only the product owner sharing what was going on and therefore not involving a team, so that really does not first of all appreciate the work that everyone in the team has done. And also it usually results in about half the attendees, that being the team, not being very engaged during the sprint reviews or share the stage and also get any feedback that you can get during the meeting with stakeholders present, with user representatives present and perhaps even have users present in the sprint review. Use this read as an opportunity to gain feedback, see how everything is landing and compare that to how you think it might be landing, Right. So that leaves us with the third encouragement. And that is often overlooked at the end of the sprint review, the product review, the show and tell I really encourage you to ensure that you flash up the top of the plan for what is coming up, show the of top of your product backlog and ensure that you have a good conversation with everyone present about what is going on in the markets that the product is present in, what is coming up for the business. Any new business priorities that we should be aware of? Is there any news about the competition? Anything that might actually alter our direction for the next planning iteration. And this read ensures that you have very good alignment with your stakeholders and with good align with the stakeholders that reduces the risk of surprises. And usually stakeholders are not too fond of surprises. So not to say that, the unexpected is forbidden from happening, because that will be ridiculous to assume we do work in a world of complexity. However, when we can align with our stakeholders, we have actually a much stronger foundation and a much better ability to deliver great value. With that our time is up I’d like to thank you very much for tuning in again and please subscribe to our channel to get updates on future videos. And not only this series but in others as well. Please give a like to this video and share any thoughts that you have in the comments. And feel free to post any ideas for new videos as well in the comments. And with that, thank very much and all the best for your practice with the team. Thank you. Bye bye.

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From the desk of Georg Fasching, passionate purveyor of Product Flow, and seasoned executive, team, and organisational change coach.

For his high-leverage, curation of methods and instruction, visit https://get.teamgenius.eu/.

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