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I would like to bring up my story for a closing project to have a discussion on practice as a Scrum Master.

At that time I am working as a member in the Development Team roled as a support Engineer and Scrum Master in the Scrum Team for the offshore team. One day I have received the notice that, the project will be closed and Scrum Master (as Server Engineer as well), designer and the other Engineers will not be in the team anymore except me.

The remaining goal for the current project will be notified the users that the project will be closed. Actually the team now composed of Product Owner, me and one Engineer in the offshore team. The Product Owner asked me to provide a plan for the remaining time.

Since the team size is far less than what the guidelines mentioned and the goal is clear that the remaining part will not have changes. I have suggested to the Product Owner to do the followings:

  1. Close the current sprint, move all the unfinished tasks back into the Product Backlog archived as Lesson Learned.
  2. Adopt Waterfall approach for the remaining time, and breakdown the tasks required to fulfill the goal.
  3. Keep daily standup to make sure there will have no impediments for the remaining tasks.
  4. Sprint retrospect will be held on the project closing date and deliver that to the Product Owner.

To my opinion, this is what I can do for the time to keep up with the responsibility for the remaining tasks done. I would like to bring up a discussion to see what you will do if you were me.

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2 Answers 2

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A few possible approaches:

  • Treat the final month as a single sprint. Do all the usual Scrum ceremonies.
  • Adopt a Kanban approach and just try and workflow the remaining tasks as best you can.
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  • Thanks for the answer. I did take the first approach as Scrum events are somehow important (but no one care maybe) but I cannot call it an official Sprint since the original time frame for a Sprint is 2 weeks which theoretically cannot be changed (sure I think it is a special case)
    – Jonathan
    Commented Dec 21, 2018 at 4:01
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    We try to keep sprints the same length so that it is easier to predict our future sprint capacity. In your situation the future capacity isn't really important, so it makes sense to use whatever sprint length works best.
    – Barnaby Golden
    Commented Dec 21, 2018 at 9:41
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Is there any item on the backlog the PO could prioritise and could be delivered on time?

Being a small team, you might not need to have all ceremonies (such as Daily Scrum). Do them only if you need they'd help on delivering value.

Being the last iteration, you might want proceed with a lessons learned session or handover some knowledge to other teams (in case the product will keep running).

If the project will no longer be used, investing efforts on it may be a waste of capacity. If the PO has nothing that could be prioritised, then just make sure you leave the project as organized as possible (in case of an eventual reactivation).

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  • Thanks for the comment. Actually the project will be closed so no more tasks from the Product Backlog has to be implemented except those related to the announcement of project closure.
    – Jonathan
    Commented Dec 26, 2018 at 3:20

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