After my team’s daily stand up, I went to join the embedded team. Looking over all the tasks entered the day before I tried to figure out what feature they belonged to, writing down the task, ID, feature and hours on sticky notes. Endeavoring to finish before stand up which happens at mid day, I wasn’t even a third the way through by then. I did manage to write down impediments to put up in a visible list tomorrow but really had no idea if they were talking about the tasks entered, and no idea which feature in the white board MPP they could be speaking about.

I was able after the meeting to get people together who could remove a blocker for them to better understand how to solve the problem. This did take away from time to continue writing down the tasks on a sticky as did a couple meetings, and a foosball beating, with my team. By the day’s end I had them all down and arranged them against the MPP white board and slowly transformed it in to a Sprint Board.

Once finished, I took the Product Owner and the other Scrum Master over to show my handiwork. This board made the Product Owner tingle with excitement. Both agreed it gave a lot more insight into what was happening, which was many tasks bucketed outside of the prioritized feature list, and falling into ‘other’. Since this can be de-scoped and already the burn down looks bad, I have a little plan for tomorrow, too. I also took this opportunity to let them know that my ulterior motive was to get the prioritized Product Backlog in order, and asked if they would like help generating a Release Plan. The response was certainly positive.