What is the Scrum Values Assessment?
Scrum teams are built upon five core values: commitment, focus, openness, respect, and courage. But what do these actually mean to your team, and how well does the team practice these values?
The Scrum Values Assessment is a great way to assess the team’s agile values together and to decide the types of behaviour the team wants to practice, as well as the anti-patterns they want to avoid.
This 60-90 minute exercise can be run as part of a retrospective, or as a standalone activity.
What Are the Five Scrum Values?
Commitment
The scrum value of commitment is key to an agile culture. Scrum teams work together as a unit. People trust each other to follow through on their commitments. Agile teams only agree to take on tasks they believe they can complete, so they are careful not to overcommit.
Courage
Courage is critical to an agile team’s success. Scrum teams must feel safe enough to say no, to ask for help, and to try new things. Agile teams must be brave enough to question the status quo when it hampers their ability to succeed.
Focus
Focus is one of the best skills scrum teams can develop. Focus means finishing what you start – so agile teams limit the amount of work in progress.
Openness
Members of an agile team are not afraid to ask for help when they need it. Equally, they value honest feedback. They are open to new ideas and opportunities.
Respect
Scrum team members demonstrate respect to one another and everyone they work with. Agile teams strength is down to how well they collaborate. Everyone makes valuable contributions toward the sprint work. They respect each other’s ideas, give each other slack where needed, and recognize each other’s accomplishments.
How to run the Scrum Values Assessment
- Introduce the exercise, the goal and the steps. Review each of the Scrum values and their meaning.
- For each value, have everyone rate the team’s current score. You may want to enable Private Writing and Hide Identities for this part.
- Reveal scores and review them together – acknowledging the high and low scores.
- Then for each value, ask the team to brainstorm the related behaviours they do want to see, and the anti-patterns they do not.
- Reveal stickies and review the points together. Reflect on the points added and decide as a team if there is anything that could be changed. Repeat the exercise at a later date to see if the scores improve.
