Strategies for a Scrum Master: Enhancing Queuing Experience at Offline Booths/Stores

Description:

Your Scrum Team is developing a queuing machine with the following Product Vision and Goals:

• Product Vision: Making queuing a delightful experience at offline booths/stores
• Product Goal: A reliable and integrated queuing machine

Your team's product is facing a pandemic situation where various services are quiet, and there are no longer queues of visitors, rendering your Product Vision and Goals obsolete.

Question:

List the steps you would take as a Scrum Master to help the Scrum Team deal with this situation (minimum 3 steps/strategies).

Answer:

As a Scrum Master, I would:

• Discuss with the Product Owner and ask them to decide whether the Sprint Goal is still valid or obsolete. If the Sprint Goal is obsolete, I would remind/suggest to the Product Owner to cancel the sprint if it is still ongoing.
• Facilitate the daily scrum so that the Product Owner can inform the development team about what is happening and determine whether the sprint goal is still valid or obsolete, allowing the team to adjust plans for the next 24 hours.
• Since the Product goal is obsolete, it will lead to the Sprint Goal not being achieved. Therefore, I, as a Scrum Master, will facilitate a Sprint Review to inform stakeholders about what has happened and gather input from them on what should be done next. I will also review the remaining Backlog items and the done Backlog, exploring the possibility of release. Additionally, I will suggest to the Scrum team and stakeholders to consider "Pivoting," which involves:
• Changing strategy to adapt to the pandemic situation by releasing some features or backlog items that are already done as a new product. For example, releasing features such as entertainment as a new entertainment application or queuing as a mobile-based queuing application.
• Incorporating some of the done features into a larger feature set as part of another product. For example, combining queuing or entertainment features into another application being developed by the company.
• Changing platforms, for instance, from an application to software or vice versa. For instance, transforming the queuing machine into a mobile application for use by delivery couriers.
• Focusing on different customers by positioning the company in a new market or vertical.
• If necessary, I will facilitate a Sprint Retrospective as a Scrum Master to learn why this happened and how the team can understand and adapt to improve in the next sprint.
• Canceling a sprint can be disappointing for the development team as they may feel that the work done will be in vain. Therefore, as a Scrum Master, I will encourage the development team to stay motivated.
• Facilitate the Product Owner to discuss with stakeholders to:
• Update the product vision and product goal considering the changed problems related to the pandemic situation.
• Conduct user research, create user personas, user stories, and user mapping.
• Request the Product Owner to plan a new sprint goal.
• If there are new directives from stakeholders, I, as a Scrum Master, will facilitate sprint planning so that the development team can focus on these new directives.
• If the sprint is not continued, I will inform the Scrum team to regroup with other Scrum teams for the existing sprint in the company.