Tools…

Ok, first of all I’m a strong advocate of NOT using tools and applications to run Scrum, and that Scrum is about people, communication, visibility and transparency and that the best way to achieve this is to scream it out to the world on a nice white board, after all, you should have nothing to hide.

A colleague of mine, however, raised the idea of having a set of tools or “things” specific for a ScrumMaster to use? Along the lines loading something like a PDA with a sort of ScrumMaster Toolbox that he could carry around (like your traditional Project Manager’s with their clipboards 😉 ) that would aid and facilitate him in doing a better job? Then I got to thinking what this “toolbox” would include, I guess something along the lines of:

• Contact details and roles of all the people involved in the project (PO, Team, Management, Users, BA’s, Pizza Delivery etc), essentially everyone that can prove useful in aiding the team in completing the sprint successfully.
• A way to manage and record progress on current impediments.
• A kind of stopwatch / countdown tool to manage the time-boxing, preloaded with the predefined times for different meetings.
• A few core documents defining Scrum, or core principles, a sort of “suggested reading” list. An example here would be the Agile Manifesto.
• A place to easily jot down notes during meetings.
• Perhaps a list of “games” that can be played to aid in understanding the benefit of Scrum?
• A list of personal and blackmail information on various team members to use against them to force them to…. oh wait a minute, that would be old style management 😉

Not sure if any of this would be useful but I think it might, and I could always improve on the tool set as I go along, perhaps I’ll give it a try and see how useful it proves to be…