Just Do It!
Scrum is an empirical process. This means that the Scrum team will try many experiments during each sprint, and will form hypotheses during their sprint retrospective. The team will do some great things, and continue to improve upon them. It will also make many mistakes, and will learn from them by trying more experiments. As long as the team continues to take action by trying new things and learning from those attempts, it will get better.
As a trainers for Certified ScrumMaster courses, we talk at the end of the course about that first sprint. We always tend to shock at least some of the students when we tell them that the first Sprint is going to be messy. We get these looks like, “That’s why I came to class, to get all of the answers so that we don’t have a messy sprint. How can you do this to me?” We go on to explain that no matter how much understanding you have about the Scrum framework, you will only learn by doing. You will make some mistakes and find things that aren’t working quite right. You can also expect that Scrum will expose many impediments (those elephants in the room) that need to be resolved for the team to be able to produce each and every sprint.
When we go and coach teams, especially those that are about to start their first sprint, there is considerable reluctance to get started. We hear, “We haven’t figured out everything to start the project!”There’s a strong urge to spend a lot of time upfront gathering requirements, designing architecture, and figuring out the work, just as we’ve all been used to in past projects. In fact, many teams will create a “Sprint 0″ to do this activity. I went into one team and their Sprint 0 was three months long! Sprint 0 is not part of Scrum. (If you don’t believe me, go check out any Ken Schwaber’s three books. You won’t find any reference to this.)
While I do believe that some time is needed to form the team and gather some requirements, I usually can get teams to complete the work necessary to accomplish this in just a few days. Especially with requirements, I ask them only to focus on what is needed for the first sprint or two and nothing more on the product backlog. After all, I tell them, we will learn through the empirical process if we have done the right thing and how to make the next sprint better.
Nike had a wildly popular campaign a few years ago, “Just do it!” 
That saying has stuck with me as I coach Scrum teams. Don’t wait to get the perfect plan! JUST DO IT! Don’t wait until we have figured out exactly how to do the work! JUST DO IT! Let’s get started and start learning how to do this process and adapt it for our organization. Let’s start showing some results to the business and deliver functionality to our customers. We can’t do anything until you start!
So what are you waiting for? JUST DO IT and start your sprint!
February 9th, 2009 at 12:14 am
[...] into the market now, before your competitors do. My colleague Skip Angel exhorts teams to “just do it.” And my own experiences with watchful waiting have shown me the rear end of many [...]
March 4th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
This begs the age old question – Which comes first Motivation or Action?
I’m not talking chicken and egg – there is a real practical correct answer here!
Does a body at rest tend to stay at rest? Yes – unless acted upon!
Does the spark come before the flame? Yes!
Action precedes Motivation. And the phrase ‘Just Do It’ is the call to action. Motivation to do it right or better will follow. And if you are lucky you’ll have plenty of iterations to get better.