Integrated Agile Coach

Posted on 5, Dec 2011

Coaching of teams has been always great source of ideas for us. Many features in ScrumDesk have been implemented because of daily touch with real-life teams. You can benefit from that value built-in into our solutions what differentiate us from other project management tools.

In coaching sessions we observed typical patterns that appear in every team being transitioned to agile. They are so obvious that we are even able to predict the time when they start to be more visible and intensive. As we repeated the same answers for the same questions for quite long time. Because of that we decided to bring something new which tools should help with.

Our idea is to help teams all around the globe to improve. We know typical gaps. We want to  help you to indetify them and suggest helpfull advices. Therefore we  integrated an agile coach into ScrumDesk.

Agile Coach in ScrumDesk

What is integrated coach?

Integrated coach in ScrumDesk validates project, backlog and other project assets. It does not just validate, but it provides suggestions how to solve gaps.  Scrum Master can identify problems sonner and solve them before they become a real problems that can stop the team.

In this first iteration we focused on:

  • proper project setup
  • team organization
  • backlog prioritization
  • and agile planning

All identified issues are displayed in the list on the left side with description of the issue, explanation how to solve it and furter resources (links) where more information can be found.

Color of the issue says how many percent of items in your project have the problem:

  • green color for minor issue, issue is not repeated many times
  • yellow color if most then half of items have the mentioned problem
  • orange if more than 80% of items have the same problem

The items with the same issue are displayed in the list on the right side.  You can access and change details by double-click the item, in some case right in place.

Further plans

We plan to implement more rules to help Scrum Masters to identify gaps in flow in near future. These rules are based on our continuous coaching and very well known scrum checklists.

We also plan to provide configuration of rules to apply or prevent to be applied in the check (for example if you do kanban, iteration is not necessary). This will allows to create YOUR team rules.

Stay tuned!