It's amazing when a lesson heard becomes a lesson learned.  It's like when you go speeding past the speed limit sign only to find yourself pulled over a few miles down the road, practically crying to the terminator-like highway patrolman who obviously doesn't seem deterred by your pity-gathering efforts.  You know then that you're going to get a ticket.  You know that the sign was there to remind you that this is, in fact, a law that you're breaking by speeding and you know that you just learned your lesson - at least for another 6 months.

Well, our development and product teams just heard and then learned a similar lesson last week in regards the our most recent sprint.  We have had the privilege recently of working closely with Jeff Sutherland, one of the inventors of the Scrum process. 

We first met with Jeff back in September.  He came onsite and dissected our current process.  He saw our scrum board, which was embarrassingly off the mark.  That feeling can only be equated to having a guest show up to your house and realizing, after they have already used the bathroom that your toilet is filthy.  (Not that this has ever happened to me, of course.)

Jeff helped us get back on track.  The team was excited about the things we learned and we implemented changes the very next day.  The process for developing our local marketing software improved with each sprint.   

This week we were able to learn from Jeff again, this time via video conference.  Jeff focused on the importance of making sure a story is Ready.  If a story is not entirely ready, it causes mid-sprint confusion.  Teams are debating, clarifying and essentially scrambling after a story has already started.  Now, we heard this lesson very clearly.  We felt pretty confident in our current sprint, so we began identifying times when this had happened and ways we could alleviate that and talking theoretically about how to avoid this - in the future.  Later on in the week, we learned that lesson the hard way.

The hardest stories to get Ready are the ones that are for a particular client.  We have to rely on a third party to be thorough in providing us with the information, and we have to hold hard deadlines, which is also hard to do when working with our valued franchise marketing clients.  

The team thought that this story was ready, but upon starting the work, we realized it was NOT.  The story requirements did not match the local store marketing sample data.  The sample data suggested that the scope of work was entirely different.  And we were two days away from the end of the sprint.  Rather than ignore the miss, we took drastic measures to adjust the sprint, and manage expectations with the client. 

The bottom line is, on Monday, we heard the message from Jeff about the importance of making sure that a story is Ready.  On Thursday, we learned what having a story Ready means and what it means to our success as a team.  Valuable lessons learned.  Doubled velocity, here we come.