Recently, in my work helping teams to learn and implement Scrum, I have deliberately not been using diagrams. Having participants create their own ways of describing Scrum based on their own understanding is often a much more powerful approach to learning than showing them a diagram. If you give someone a map, they tend to assume that all of the exploring has already been done. If you give them a space to explore, they tend to create their own maps and provide new knowledge about the space being explored. Maps and diagrams do serve a purpose. They are useful. What’s important to always keep in mind is that they should not be regarded as definitive but rather as one contribution to a body of knowledge that can and should grow.
Anyhow, this isn’t intended to be a blog post about diagrams but rather as a post sharing a diagram that I have created. One of the participants of a Scrum training that I recently facilitated asked me for a diagram and I said I would find one for him. All of the other diagrams out there that I could find didn’t exactly convey my own understanding of Scrum. So, I decided to create my own.
This is the first increment. I am open to feedback and I look forward to finding out how this interacts with others’ understanding of Scrum.
You can download it at this link: Meet: Scrum.
Affiliated Promotions:
Please share!
I like this, especially the speech bubbles.
Suggestion, make the Scrum Events and Scrum Artifacts title boxes more distinct from their list.
Wonder if an alternate shape for each of the 4 roles would be helpful for color blind folks?
The big thing that I notice is missing is Backlog Refinement.
One additional comment. I notice that there is no mention of the values of Scrum. I noticed because I feel that the ScrumMaster says “…theory…” But shouldn’t that be “…values…”? Of course finding space to list the values might be challenging 🙂
It looks coherent!
What hit me about this was for the first time I realized that clip art can be used in a way that is NEUTRAL.
I mean this in the sense that within itself a font is also neutral. Just like we don’t normally mix fonts in a single word or sentence this graphic doesn’t mix clip art. It works very well as a result. I take the thought bubbles as a form of “voice over” narration and again the text font is consistent, as are the forms of the bubbles.
The feature that hit me when I looked at this graphic was that the use of clip art in this case is consistent and so comes across as NEUTRAL. Thus the idea is communicated clearly.
The neutral feature is effective because it doesn’t mix different bits and pieces of clip art. Just as it is not usual to mix font styles in a single work of text, the use of the same font in a work allows meaning to be more easily recognized as there is no distraction arising from the font itself.
I printed this diagram and put it on the wall for my team! It has a great balance between clarity and just enough information. One suggestion: don’t use a snail shell as symbol for sprint. I guess you mean it as a spiral, but well… a snail doesn’t imply speed. 🙂
Hello Frank,
Fair comment about the “snail shell”. I believe it’s meant to be a conch shell: a rare and precious shell often used a symbol of great value. Suitable, I think, to represent a Sprint Goal. Maybe this symbolism is lost in the cartoon illustration.
I think the shell was a reference to the Fibonacci sequence…
Good day,
I would like to request permission to distribute the image please?
Please explain more about what you need.