What's the secret to optimizing your Scrum team's deliverables?

In my opinion its not optmizing deliverables but understanding the sprint goal and if you achieved the 80 to 90% of sprint goal, you achieve the actual goal. As we worked in agile so this is actual beauty of agile being flexible and negotiateable.

Based on my experience: 1. Foster open communication and transparency within the team. 2. Set clear and achievable sprint goals and priorities. 3. Embrace continuous improvement through regular retrospectives. 4. Empower team members to take ownership and make decisions. 5. Encourage collaboration and cross-functional skills development. 6. Limit multitasking and focus on completing sprint tasks. 7. Prioritize quality through automated testing and code reviews. 8. Adapt to change and iterate based on feedback from stakeholders. 9. Maintain a sustainable pace to prevent burnout and ensure long-term productivity. 10. Foster a culture of trust, respect, and accountability within the team.

The best way as a scrum master to optimize your sprint goal or deliverables is to work closely with the product owner and understand the sprint goal which should add value to the end product. Sm and Po are husband and wife 🤼♂️ Scrum msster is wife who work closely with its (children) development team to achieve the goals and Product owner is the husband who can prioritized the product backlog and overlooked the project.

It's like knowing exactly what you want to build and why. For instance, if you're creating a new app, understanding the goal means knowing who the app is for, what problems it will solve, and what it should look like. When everyone on the team understands the product goal, they can work together more effectively to make sure the product turns out the way it should, which optimizes your team's work and the end result.

Well defined Product Goal builds the basic foundation of Scrum Team. It helps the team to organize their strategy related to research, designing & developments perspective. Moreover helps the scrum team to move to next step and decide on their deliverables. Established Goal fosters Clarity among cross-functional teams. Each team member can review & evaluate product backlog items and provide valuable updates on refinement & more insight to it.

There are situations when you need a goal, whether in product or sprint. It is very useful when the focus in the team has been lost. When you are not sure about priorities. Take a look in the goal, which has to be clearly defined, and the answer is there.

Building a Product Vision in collaboration with the team is a great first step! That can bring everyone together, not only understanding but sharing the same goal! I love Roman Pichler's Product Vision Board. What a fantastic tool to help with the whole idea!

When articulating your product goal, think and speak in terms of the problem you're solving instead of focusing on the solution. This is not easy and takes a lot of practice and research on the part of the product team (Product Manager, Product Owner, etc.). Understanding the problem your product solves opens you to all the possible ways you can solve the problem and gets to the heart of why people will buy your product or use your software.

Refining the Product Backlog is merely one step to creating an artifact that represents the best possible use of our Scrum team’s time at any moment while pursuing the Product Goal. More important is the definition of a transparent system that feeds practical requirements, ideas, suggestions, and other work items aligned with the current Product Goal into the Product Backlog. Such a system prevents stakeholders from regarding your team as a black box, builds rapport and trust, and encourages everyone to contribute to the value maximization effort.

There are several parts to refining the backlog. Finding the highest value things to work on is usually the most important outcome. Cutting them down to workable size is also an important outcome. It is often better to provide the most valuable bits of 5 features in the time we could deliver just one feature but with "all bells and whistles". This approach is good in that it means we can discover sooner which of those 4 extra features we "squeezed in" is genuinely used more; it gives us feedback on the real value of the features and which we should make more robust soonest. Until features get used, we're really only guessing at their value... despite what the customers tell us!

When I see backlog with a few items ( i am calling it, an empty) product reached it's end, or not a real product. Those few should land in some other product. The value of the product is it's endless backlog full of great ideas! Keeping it organized is a half way to success.

Sprint Goal keeps the cross-functional team focused and determined about deliverables. All efforts are taken & measured encompassing Sprint goal only. They decompose the features and take up work in alignment with Sprint Goal.

The Sprint Goal is not “defined” but co-created by all Scrum team members, based on the business objective the Product Owner chose for the new Sprint.

To improve your Scrum team's work, it's essential to set a clear goal for each sprint. This goal is like a specific target, such as improving a part of your project in a short time, like two weeks. For example, if you're working on a mobile app, your goal could be to make the app load faster. When everyone knows this goal, it's easier to concentrate on the important task and collaborate to achieve it, making your team's work better.

Definition of Done is a checklist of all the things you've deemed or agreed with other stakeholders to be required quality before delivery. Its best use is as an aide-memoir for all the things you only occasionally need, so might forget. For all the things you always need, try to automate them. You won't avoid tech debt and rework, but you can cut it down to a sensible minimum. Keep the DoD short; it's a checklist not a specification. Too verbose and people won't read it. Too many "always" items and people might skim and miss things. It's real value is where, on reading, the developer says "Ah! We'll need that this time".

Along with DoD, make sure acceptance criteria is well defined to help identify how and what to test prior to sprint start. It will shake out any late additions or interruptions that could slow down the team. As a bonus, this also helps tremendously with creating automation in-sprints and opens up the avenue for exploratory testing. When those elements are met, the story is well understood by most or all members, rallying to meet the goal is simpler, and regression is automated over time which leads to even more efficiencies.

As the team owns quality, the DoD is a team agreement to make sure they are delivering a product/increment with quality. A good practice is to deal with DoD as a live agreement. Especially in the beginning, the team should feel they can apply the learnings from the past sprints to adjust it and make it better.

The value of the retrospective is the improved understanding, not the action points. I recall one team who for 3 successive retrospectives had an outcome "We didn't learn the 'lessons learned'". Then they got it; it wasn't re-writing the process that mattered; it was applying the better understanding as the work was being done. Too many of the reported events were "one-off" and bloating the process to cope didn't help. What worked was having the developers think more about what they were doing, at the time they were doing it. Grow the understanding, and apply it.

Retrospective must be conducted in a way where each team member can be relaxed and self reflect on the process they followed in the sprint. The objective of the retro must be clear to them at the beginning only. It's not the people or product ...It's always process or approach which needs to be scrutinized....All discussions must follow towards the betterment. Team must identify what should be stopped or continue doing and they must come up with their genuine ideas. Its the time to make up our mind for next sprint and rectify or amend our practices.

The key to making your Scrum team's work better is to follow Scrum's important values like being open, committed, focused, respectful, and brave. When your team shares these values, it helps build trust and teamwork. For example, when everyone is honest and works well together, it's easier to solve problems, keep promises, and stay on track, leading to better results in your projects.

The team that truly lives by scrum values can bring best optimized deliverables. The team members support each other, have mutual respect, their conversations are honest, they are committed towards their goal for the sprint, inspect and adapt their work constantly and the best results automatically flow out.

Scrum is not about optimizing deliverables, rather optimizing predictability and controlling risk. It is about adaptability, which is often at odds with optimization.

The secret to optimizing your Scrum team's deliverables is clear communication and continuous improvement. Make sure everyone on the team understands the goals and expectations, and regularly review what's working and what's not. Consider gathering feedback from the team and stakeholders, and be open to making changes when needed. For example, if you're building a software product, keeping the lines of communication open with the development team and the end-users can help ensure the product is meeting its objectives and can be adjusted as necessary to improve it.

I think that is what this covers Johnny H., this article is about controlling predictability and risk to deliver consistently and with a high degree of optimization. You and the article are essentially on the same side of this. ;)

There is a missing topic: what to do when the team misses the sprint goal. Having a retro is the way, but usually, the mindset is not the right one. Instead of asking why the team didn't complete the sprint goal, the focus of the conversation should be on the learnings from that, bringing a positive outcome for future sprints, while building psychological safety about (quick) failures.