Application of scrum framework in admin & finance team

Before I started my career at ableneo and in the IT sector, I had never encountered expressions like scrum, agile, and kanban before. During my three years in the company, these concepts became familiar to me and are an important part of my working life.

At the beginning of the admin and finance team, we started with weekly meetings in the form of a kanban board where we defined priorities and discussed the importance of individual tasks in the team for the whole week. Every week we presented what we finished, what was in the process, and what we didn’t manage to accomplish. However, this method did not show us the longer-term planning of activities that the admin & finance team has defined each month.

That’s why we’ve started monthly planning of activities with two-week sprints. This method was also not very successful for us, as the ad-hoc activities that always appeared could not be planned on a two-week basis.

How do we work now?

It worked out for us to have weekly sprints as well as team meetings every Monday, where we define priorities or problematic topics that we have to solve together as a team in a given week. Subsequently, we enter all tasks into the Jira system in which we work and gradually implement them according to priorities. Of course, proper and timely communication in the team is important so that we can intervene operatively and solve the problem without undue delay. Subsequently, we evaluate the goals quarterly, that we set at the beginning and also make a retrospective that shows the pros and cons of the functioning of the team for a given period.

What do I see as the benefits?

Thanks to adoption of Scrum framework in admin and finance team, company has a comprehensive overview of the performance over time, the workload of the team due to regularly recurring activities, the planning of ad-hoc activities from other departments of the company and their division in the team. We’ve shortened processes as we estimate individual tasks and eliminate tasks that are duplicated. We have defined periods in the month when the workload does not allow us to help other teams to avoid interruptions.

It was a lot of work and experiments to get the team to work in a modified scrum method as it is now and I can tell you that it has been working really well for us in the admin and finance team for over a year.