Artful Scrum

Before the first version of Scrum Guide was written in the mid 90’s, the idea of this framework had been introduced in the late 80’s of the 20th century.
It’s relatively not so long time ago.
Since then, popularity of the approach has been growing at a dizzying pace. Even before that, in 1970 appeared a document by Dr. Winston W. Royce (“Managing the Development of Large Software Systems’’), within which he mentioned ideas heading toward agile.
BUT…
The approach we proudly call Scrum has been known for much longer than that.
Maybe it wasn’t called that way or didn’t have a name at all, but its existence was surreptitiously helping out to build fame of the greatest artist in a musical world!
To be more precise, it has been fostering a uniqueness of most outstanding and prominent stars that belong to the classical and jazz world of music for centuries till now.
It has been happening since a demand for professional performances on a stage was gaining steam.
The idea for concert music unfurled in baroque music (XVII century), developed through classicistic period, moving into a tremendous hype around virtuosos in Romanticism (XIX), up to now, when high standards of performance is a must if an artist wants to hold somebody’s interest at all.
High expectations of an audience and the competition in the oversaturated market put constant pressure on them to get better.
Yes, Kaizen forever!
Before their careers reached stars, they had to get through a long and tough process.
And here the story actually begins…
You may think, that those successful artist were born that way: so talented and doomed to triumph.
They grow up and all of a sudden become famous. So easy, so simple, so incredible.
The talent without sweat is amateurish or non- professional-in another words it is not enough to be outstanding at any discipline.
Others state bitterly that ‘’Hard work can often make up for the lack of talent’’. I would say that without hard work you won’t get to know your true talent.
Tricky? Cliche?
Without constant improving you are stuck, however promising.
So, what musicians do to be not only promising, but also successful?
Almost every of them go through the process of exploiting best out of them:
The music school for 12 years and then music conservatory 4 or 5 years long plus lifelong studying the subject afterwards.
No matter what their experience is, it involves:
- Iterative work
- Achievable goals
- Planning of work
- Regular Reviews of results
- Retrospectives on a Daily Basis, Week Basis and so on
- Teachers/Mentors/Coaches/Servant leaders
- Embodying values to better perform and absorb new skills
- Breaking work down into small pieces
- Team- and solo work
- Attitude
Statistically, they need to spend on ‘’getting there’’ around 10.000 hours of practise.
It’s not about talent now. It’s about perseverance.
‘’Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm” -Winston Churchill
So, they are making mistakes for about 15 years to prove they can get where they want:
- Practising every day at home- you have to know how to practise and why you are using this and not any other technique
- Twice a week a lesson with a teacher- review the work done so far, to gather new requirements, to draw conclusions and improve process based on small retrospectives (e.g the hand position is not efficient and it may become painful after a while- if you won’t change it, it may cost you a lot at the end)
- Reviews of your work are also after exams, concerts and competitions. You might call them milestones (main goal of practising is to perform in public) in the big project with the plan to become a great performer
- WBS and Limit on WIP- Working on a music piece is not just reading the score and learning by heart-when you are not agile yet you better focus on each element of music one after another. Not all at once.There is 7 of them:
- Rhythm (is it accurate?)
- Melody (does it sound natural?)
- Harmony (do you understand and hear what’s written there?)
- Agogic (in what tempo are you going to play?)
- Articulation (what technique you choose to perform? does it serve your goal?)
- Dynamics (how much forte or piano are you going to play?)
- Colour- (how are you going to combine all of the above to create what you have planned?)
- Teamwork and playing in chamber music group (in duet, trio, etc.) helps actually to be a better soloist. You start thinking two steps ahead to predict what can happen, and then you know what to do next to enhance common effort.
- Attitude is a combination of your values, motivation, what exactly drives you toward the goal (income is not the right answer here). And not letting go when you fail. When you are a musician, you will fail sooner or later-expect it, accept it, and love it. Failures are great! How would you know you need to make improvement without them?
Scrum Values according to musicians:
- if you are not open you won’t learn from your mentors
- if you won’t commit you better close the door from outside, thank you
- if you don’t have courage your performance will turn into a disaster
- if you cannot focus you are wasting your’s and somebody’s else time
- if you don’t have a respect to an audience (providing a bad quality performance)…well, the audience will forget you and it is not easy to restore its trust. All that is left then are empty chairs.
Scrum according to musicians is working step by step on User Experience: Are you preparing well to a performance? Is the audience going to like your product? Is it of high quality, original and enjoyable? Will people want to interact with it again?
The iceberg of UX is here also applicable. During the concert, you as a perceiver, experience only a top surface that covers all layers of well designed and analyzed process.
Of course, there is ‘a thing’ that differentiates every rendition.
No matter what domain or field you choose, to become a real expert and gain almost infallible intuition you need to know ins and outs of what you do.
More experienced performer, the better intuition he/she has.
Godsend is a very rare occurrence. By the way, those with the strongest intuition are considered as talented or gifted.
It is a proof that Scrum is applicable even in such a faraway field as music. Who knows, maybe it would be written down by musicians if they had enough intuition or premonitions about how much their tradition and routine were valuable for other disciplines.
Maybe they were just too focused on their work…
Stay tuned!
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