Trust in Scrums

Scrum master, Product Owner 

Agile Development no Yahoo! com Scrum — Campus Party 2009 — em português from Antonio Silveira

Now agile became more general method and I can easily see there are huge number of companies adopting the method, even in Asia.

IT was 2010, when I was granted with scrum training professionally. There were no chance to apply the method on my product development even though I was working for the biggest global online company, Yahoo!. Since that time I became scrum-holic and I trained myself with Agile / Scrum. Now it is easy for me drive a product development as scrum master.

Scrum is not just a development method, it is more about org culture.

Let’s say, you are trying to develop a product and you want to escape from the painful delivery process and even the time gets near to the release date, the pressure gets bigger all across the development team. It is not only you who wants to escape from the pain, but what is blocking you and your pal is they do not share the pain but just want to finish the development and take a rest. And the pain begins soon again with the same ‘habit’.

To get out of that painful ‘habit’ the org needs to think and communicate together. So the cultural aspect starts from here, which is communicate and find out the problem. The scrum team(s) have to be horizontal and exchanges opinions in real time. This is the biggest huddle if the org is old enough to be satisfied with establish culture and do not want changes from what they have as problem. If you did not communicate together and the atmosphere is not well-formed, scrum will never be applied.

Why it is about communicational culture? Scrum team divide the project into small piece of sprints and each of the sprint deliver small projects as long as the resource allows within given work hours. Each of the deliverables from each sprints put together before the release and ta-da. The product is delivered. The point here is about sprint planning and reviews to visualize the outputs in real forms. To get to this the team have to communicate together intensely so that they can precisely estimate what will come next.

So then, some ask, then only my team can do scrum eventhough the other team follow the old way. It may be possible but projects are not always small enough for only your team can handle. What if you need to consolidate with other team’s build? Would you wait until the whole builds be out ? And if you are a Product Manager, you may borrow engineer resource from Engineering team and the whole team is not following scrum, then would you really adopt agile process on your TFT?

If the whole org is scattered and re-uinite into small scrum teams, the estimation of others’ will be easier and you can foresee what you will do next and even you can plan 5 years strategy.

Please take a look at the slide above if you are not familiar with scrum, if you are, it will be a good recap to you.