Succeeding with Agile

ETC Sprints

Because the ETC uses Scrum, it makes progress in sprints, exactly like a Scrum development team would. Each ETC sprint begins with a planning meeting and ends with a review and retrospective. These meetings are completely analogous to those held by Scrum development teams and often have the same problems. Thomas Seffernick, of KeyCorp, a large U.S. financial institution, participated in the first sprint review of his organization’s ETC, which it called an Agile Enablement Team. He recalls how that team made a mistake common to many new Scrum development teams—talking about its plans rather than demonstrating its progress.

That first Agile Enablement [ETC] sprint review was painful as leaders stood up and described their plans to ...