After reading some thoughts from Mo Jave, and getting the equivalent of windshield time for a few months, some...

After reading some thoughts from Mo Jave, and getting the equivalent of windshield time for a few months, some thoughts on Scrum:

-- There's a lot of roleplaying I do at work. This gives some better rules.

-- I treat the tools as safety equipment: asking the devs what they can accept, asking the product owner to maintain a visible backlog, ensuring the business owners understand that development takes uninterupted time.

-- The DSM should be more useful, but our devs are far away from the PO and I. So, I ask the devs what they are working on and if they have blocks. Sometimes we go too deep on a particular problem, but I try to keep our PO from diving into it right then.

-- Sprint Planning sessions are as useful so long as you treat the commitments as commitments: the PO should not ask for changes.

-- It is a totally reasonable thing to have 1 dev a day (or so) who is "on call", and knows they may be interrupted by the PO when everything is on fire. This isn't part of scrum, but can be a decent release valve.

-- Estimation is great. Task boards are great. Visibility is great.

-- there's more I have to learn. Getting a CSM is like getting a driver's license -- you can drive, but not well.