Magnus blog

Self-selecting teams on a small scale

You don’t need a lot of people for self-selection to be useful.

Self-selection is a practice where people get to choose for themselves which team they want to be in. Typically, it is associated with large scale agile implementations and obviously, it does make sense to tackle the complicated task of organising 50 or 100 people into teams the same way we as so often solve complicated tasks in agile: self-organisation. But how about using self-selection on a much smaller scale?

In this post, I will describe a recent experience I had with self-selection in our two Scrum teams. Spoiler alert: it worked great!

5 things I’ve learned about Scrum the hard way

I got my Scrum Master certification in 2007 and have been using Scrum in many of the teams I’ve been working in since then. It’s fair to say it’s been an educational journey and in this article, I’d like to mention a few things I’ve found out along the way.

A quick way to estimate a whole product backlog

Early on, when starting a new project, we will have a product backlog (or the starting point of one) but without estimates. To be able to create a first release plan, burn down chart and so on, we will want to get at least rough estimates for all these items. If using planning poker, we will end up spending several hours but is there any alternative?