Adopting Scrum: advantages and limits
How to better work together in business is the biggest question managers have to deal with. Many organisations have adopted Scrum aiming at addressing this issue and taking advantage of the numerous benefits this framework can provide. But, is Scrum perfect? What limitations could an organisation face in practice?
What is Scrum?
As defined in the Scrum guide, Scrum is “a lightweight framework that helps people, teams, and organisations generate value through adaptative solutions for complex problems.” The name of this framework was inspired by rugby teams: they learn thanks to experience, self-organise, and continuously reflect on results in order to progress.
Developed in the early 1990s, Scrum is based on three pillars:
·Transparency: work progress must be visible by all members of the scrum team.
·Inspection: thanks to transparency, the scrum team and stakeholders can frequently inspect the work in order to detect defects earlier.
·Adaptation: inspecting the work enables to regularly adapt. Stakeholders’ needs might change or developers can suggest a new solution for instance…In Scrum, change is very welcomed.
If Scrum is new to you, please check the video below to get a complete overview.
Scrum is awesome
As a branch of agile, adopting Scrum provides numerous benefits:
· Fostering employees’ feeling of psychological empowerment: it encourages self-organisation and no hierarchy should exist between the scrum team (Product Owner, Scrum Master and developers). People can feel more trusted by the organisation and, thus, more empowered.
· Increasing sense of belonging in the workplace: Scrum team members have to work as one. They all contribute to achieving the sprint goal and the product goal and most importantly they win or fail together. One member of the team is never accountable for the value of a product backlog item. The entire Scrum team is responsible for creating and inspecting items done. Consequently, Scrum team members might have a higher sense of belonging compared to waterfall project teams where one person can be accountable for a work item.
· Increasing quality and transparency: Scrum events (sprint planning, daily Scrum, sprint review and sprint retrospective) help work closely together, improve communication, and enables all team members to align on the same goal.
· Detecting defects and errors earlier: inspection pillar which scrum is based on helps detect errors while developing the product. The Scrum team can then adapt the work in order to achieve the agreed goal. Besides, processes, Scrum artifacts and how the team collaborated during Scrum events must also be inspected in order to grow as a team.
· Delivering value faster: Scrum enables organisations to deliver value in short cycles, known as sprints. Instead of delivering a complete product at once, Scrum produces smaller pieces and continuously delivers them to customers.
But Scrum is not perfect
In practice, and as any form of organisation framework, Scrum has limits and drawbacks. As a manager or (future) member of a Scrum team, you must know about them in order to avoid or detect them earlier:
· Scrum is not designed for big teams: the Scrum guide recommends a Scrum team of three to nine people. If your team is bigger, they will not be able to respect time-boxed events. If you need more than nine people to develop a product, you will need to split the team into 2 or more Scrum teams or use another agile framework.
· Scrum requires high commitment and cooperation: inexperienced individuals can find it hard to work using Scrum, especially if they do not understand the Scrum mindset. The Scrum Master will, in this case, have a key role. As an agile coach, he must clearly explain and teach these individuals what Scrum is truly about.
· Scrum events might create frustration: the daily Scrum event can be extremely frustrating. Scrum team members must, each day, highlight what they did the day before, what they will do next, and what impediments they faced. Some people might feel untrusted and will not understand why they have to do this daily, especially since Scrum encourages self-organisation.
· Lack of documentation: the Scrum team will look towards delivering fast. Documentation might be ignored. Thus, one individual quitting the Scrum team can hugely affect its efficiency. A fortiori, integration of new members will be harder in the absence of detailed documentation.
· In practice, the product owner is not the only person who decides: in theory, and as recommended by the Scrum guide, the Product Owner is one person and is responsible for defining the product backlog. Yet, organisations have created a “Product Manager” role. He/She is responsible for identifying customer needs and might not share the same vision as the Product Owner. This can generate tension and developers might not know which is really responsible for creating backlog items.
All in all, Scrum remains a lightweight framework that you must adapt to your organisation. The iron triangle (time, cost and scope) might help you to define whether Scrum is good for you:
·Will Scrum help my organisation save time?
·Will Scrum help us produce at lower costs?
·Is Scrum adapted to the project needs?
Comment on this article with your answers to these three questions and share with us your thoughts on the Scrum framework :)
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About the author:
Passionate about all things digital, I am writing a professional thesis about the metaverse and work in a Scrum environment. Follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Medium to know more.
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.
