Yesterday, at 8:47 CET, our new Baby Scrum Team got started. After a 9 month evaluation phase, our new member Seraphine has joined the Team as Product Manager, managing herself. As my wife an me pretend to be agile proof, we had our first sprint planning, to learn more about the latest backlog items. We thought a sprint lenght of 1 week would be appropiate to start with the new team and to see how things work out.

So talking to the PO we understood, that we first have to manage the in – and output stream for the new product. Well we already informed the vendors for the input, anyhow as we weren’t 100 percent sure about when the need will start, they confirmed they are working on the supply and still need some time for it. About the output we were lucky and got informed by the nursery srum team that we don’t need to care about this. They even told us, that they know the vendors for the input for a really long time and we can be sure, that they will start delivering the needed input.

After watching the first couple of hours, the scrum master from the nursery team joined us to give us a little bit of guidance. She told us that we are doing great an yet we should think about the timebox of our sprint lenght which seems to be way to long to start with. Her recommendation is to start with 4 hours sprints and smaller stories that will grow over time and will allow us to build MVP’s that work and allow us to move ahead in an agile way.

After a team internal discussion we decided to follow that lead an switched to a 4 hours sprint focusing on the follwing user stories:

Take care of basic termal supply, deliver basic input, take care of the regular output and give a lot of love.

Sprint 1 – Review: With the help of the existing nursery scrum team we had been able to manage the basic termal support, actually we team was able to finalize the story and introduce it as a criteria to the definition of done of each story.

Sprint 2 – Review: Talking to the vendor for the basic input, we managed to identify how to do a MVP that will help us to prepare the product to be ready for the promissed stock. By practicing how to get the input out of the stock the first steps towards a continous supply have been done.

For the basic output a couple of criterias focusing on the quality of cleaning and timing had been added to the definition of done.

Sprint 3 – Review: The recommendation of the nursery team accoding to the vendors are right. They started to deliver small samples that can be used for improving the practices and build up the trust in them that they will be stable suppliers.

Sprint 4 – Review: The product manager prioritised a new story to the top of the backlog: Support to successful manage the input. The sprint team immediatly took action and reallized that this needs to be added to the definition of done too.

Sprint 5 and 6 Review: Those sprints have been used to ensure that the definition of done works out. Minor enhancements have been made to the ‘give a lot of love’ story by enhancing cuddeling, kissing and adding some background music from time to time.