As part of a Team Charter it's helpful to have an "Operations Manual" explaining how various ceremonies are done, etc.
Here's a starting point for agile teams working in one week sprints with a heavy amount of ad-hoc requests which would otherwise be handled via a kanban system:
- Thursday afternoons and Monday morning for 1 hr (adjust frequency and timing based on team’s requirements)
- PO brings new stories to the team in this time
- Team discusses the top of the backlog trying to get 1-2 sprints worth of tickets into a “Ready” state (see “Definition of Ready” below)
- Every Wednesday from 9:30-10:30am
- Purpose is to agree and commit to the stories which the team will complete in the next sprint
- Leave enough space for “unplanned” (urgent) work which must be brought into the sprint (ideally there wouldn’t be any but…)
- Whole team attends, ideally Product Owner, too.
- Daily at 9:30am
- 15 minutes max
- Anyone can facilitate
- Review stories from right to left starting with those closest to DONE.
- Identify blockers and take follow-up conversations offline
- Team members should update tickets before the standup
- Blocked tickets should be flagged and have comments added explaining what’s required to unblock them
- Every Tuesday from 2-3pm
- Everyone is invited
- Members of the team demonstrate the stories that they have finished
- Non demo-able stories are mentioned
- Team re-states the sprint goal and whether they feel it was met
- Team reports latest sprint velocity
- Briefly show the top of the backlog to remind stakeholders what’s coming up
- Q&A with attendees
- May be recorded to share with those who can’t attend
- Put unfinished tickets back onto the backlog
- Leave flags on flagged tickets (assuming they’re still blocked)
If you don’t do a “live” demo, at least send an email/report to summarise what has been delivered.
- Re-state the sprint goal
- Was it delivered? Fully?
- What stories/tickets were delivered?
- What stories/tickets were not delivered?
- What’s the current velocity?
- What’s next on the backlog?
- Every Tuesday from 3pm to 3:45pm
- Involves the team only (possibly the PO if the team and PO agree this is a good idea)
- Review what’s working well and should be continued
- Review what can be improved
- Agree actions for improvement
- Capture actions as tickets/stories and add them to the backlog under a “Kaizen” epic
- Find ways to include everyone in the discussion
- Keep retros fun and interesting
In order for a story to enter a sprint, it must have the following:
- A clear business-readable title
- A clear description of the problem being solved and the business value
- An estimate using story points
- A clear set of acceptance criteria (can be short simple bullets)
To reach the “DONE” column in the sprint, the following must be true
- The story has been deployed to a UAT environment
- All testing is passing in UAT
- The Product Owner has reviewed the functionality and approved it
- The story is ready to go LIVE in the next release.
(The above is an example, you might choose to go even further by saying the story is live)