Managing Project Management with Scrum

Scrum isn't just for engineering anymore (actually, it never was). At Acquia, we are experimenting with having the role of Product Owner for one of our new products be a team which itself uses scrum to organize its work. The team currently consists of people whose "normal" job for the product is product manager, product marketing manager, engineering manager, and product architect. This team runs itself using full-scale scrum, with stories, backlog grooming, sprint planning, daily standup, retrospective, stakeholder sprint reviews, etc. After 20 sprints, we have learned a lot about how to make this process work. Our velocity has literally doubled since we started. Although several of the team members were skeptics when we began, everyone on the team now believes the process is working well and is, in fact, liberating.

In this session, we'll describe our overall approach and what we've learned and changed, including:

* Our checklists for sprint planning, grooming, and retrospective.

* How to be productive on a scrum team on a typical day contains so many meetings.

* How to be productive when so much product ownership work involves external dependencies (such as marketing) who are not on the team.

* How we do stakeholder sprint reviews and what are stakeholders think of them.

* How do we track "the flow of value through the system" for the entire product.

Participants should be at least a little bit familiar with scrum, and hopefully will leave the session knowing how to apply this process to project management at their own company.