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Scrum Discovery Cheat Sheet - From a Superficial to Scientific Understanding of Scrum

November 2, 2021
Discovering The Scientific Purpose of Scrum Elements

10+ years of helping thousands of practitioners with implementation of Professional Scrum has taught me one thing - most practitioners have a very superficial understanding of Scrum. To most, Scrum is nothing more than "Daily Standup" and "Sprint Demo".

8+ years of learning from the Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainer Community has taught me many techniques to expand and elevate this flawed, superficial understanding of Scrum among my students and clients. One of the best techniques I learned from the Scrum.org PST Community is a game called Scrum Discovery. I think it was invented and refined by Kate Terlacka and Dani Tobler, but I could be wrong. I have adapted their game into the Scrum Discovery Cheat Sheet.

You can use this cheat sheet in many different contexts...

  1. Before you deliver or attend Scrum training
  2. Deepening your understanding after you attend Scrum training
  3. Preparing for a Scrum.org assessment
  4. Helping others deepen their understanding of Scrum

Here's how you might get the best results from this cheat-sheet...

  1. Print out the cheat-sheet
  2. Choose a real world company you are familiar as the context for completing this exercise.
  3. Try to answer all the questions in the cheat-sheet in the context of how you would implement Professional Scrum in that company if you had a magic wand to wish away all the dysfunctions
  4. Read the Scrum Guide
  5. Understand every single term mentioned in the Scrum Glossary and Professional Scrum Development Glossary
  6. Answer all the questions in the cheat-sheet. Make improvements as you discover new insights.
  7. Take the these free practice assessments - Scrum Open Assessment, Product Owner Open AssessmentScrum Developer Open Assessment
  8. Make a list of every question you got wrong
  9. Go back to step 4 with special focus on the questions you got wrong
  10. Repeat the assessments until you score 100% consistently

Hope this helps. Let me know how it went for you and how we can make this better.

And if you want your teams to shift from wasting time and money with superficial Scrum to maximizing value with scientific Scrum, contact us to see how we can help you.

Scrum On!


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