How We SCRUM
This post contributed by Learning.com Scrum Masters Kristie Mitten, Heather Burns, and Rick Martin
How SCRUM can help you even when your customers and business aren’t agile:
Like many of you, mapping the needs of our customers and our business strategy to the Agile methodology sometimes feels like fitting a square peg in a round hole. Rapid changes to our product can often mean frustration and loss of time and productivity to our customers. Our market is incredibly date-driven, so as a business, we must hit certain deadlines with full feature sets or risk losing revenue and renewals for the year. None of this is particularly conducive to the iterative development strategies we’ve all been hearing about.
Despite these challenges, we’ve been able to adopt the SCRUM framework across many departments, including Development, IT/WebOps, Marketing, and Customer Success. While we all interpret the guidelines a little differently, we’ve seen huge benefits when applying this framework to how we approach planning, delivering, and getting feedback on any project.
Having a space to learn from mistakes and feeling safe to try something and fail
Holding regular retrospectives with your team can have a significant impact on how you identify and approach challenges. Regardless of what your work management strategy is, creating opportunities for your team to voice frustrations, challenges, successes, ideas, wish-lists, etc. sets the tone for self-reflection and continued improvement. Retrospectives are the feedback loop that creates flexibility, and dare we say, agility, in how your team can best accomplish a task. -HB
Easier to prioritize and focus on singular projects
It is quite common in technology that a team of diverse skillsets are asked to execute on a complicated and intricate concept in, what is seemingly, an impossible amount of time. SCRUM has given us a set of guidelines for a team to come together and break down a project into clear components and then group them in ways that make sense based on the context of the work. Not only does this make an overwhelming project more achievable, it also gives you more tools to have discussions about priority outside of your team. Deadlines and expectations become dramatically easier to talk about when you can identify individual components instead of an over-arching concept. -HB
Being able to quickly identify process problems and adjust
They say the key to successful implementation of Agile is to embrace the mindset of continuous improvements. After practicing SCRUM for a few years and always aiming towards continual improvement, one of our teams switched to Kanban to accommodate a very interrupt-driven work flow. Kanban is designed to be flexible, as priorities can change really quickly. This model of simplicity dictates that we limit the amount of work in progress, finish what we’ve started before beginning something new, and most importantly, always work on ‘the next most important thing’. As a result, our cycle time decreased, our productivity increased, our morale improved, and there’s less tension and less overhead … essentially, a happier team. -KM
Bringing a sense of both Teamwork AND personal responsibility to work-loads
SCRUM has brought our team naturally closer, simply by participating in the sprint ceremonies. Our ‘best hour of the sprint’, without question, is during our sprint retrospective. We share honestly and openly, on what we liked, didn’t like, wanted more of, and what we could do without. We also celebrate each other in a very genuine way. We have learned more about how to do things better together than any other meeting on our calendar. This has built a trust level to an unexpected level and for some — friendship. -RM
Increased sense of ownership and commitments and allowing for greater self-management and motivation
In an interrupt driven department where the priorities can switch with the next heartbeat, SCRUM has been a needed and welcome breath of fresh air for our team, improving the ownership and quality of work we do. Infrastructure updates, upgrades and maintenance is accounted along with the goals of the department as we work through the SCRUM ceremonies. Once we found our team velocity, accounting for the unknown emergent needs we would eventually encounter every sprint, the ownership and quality of work improved because each team member selected and committed to, the work for that given sprint. We now manage and protect ourselves from under/over burdening our workloads because we now trust our team performance. -RM
Easier communication between departments who share similar cycles and vocabulary
To facilitate easier communication across departments and company-wide, we’re beginning to have SCRUM of SCRUMs. It’s a cross-team synchronization method that helps multiple teams achieve common goals more easily, focusing specifically on areas of overlap and integration. Teams selected a representative to attend the sessions, which will provide a platform to share high-level updates on their respective team’s work, identify impediments, and collaborate and plan for help needed from other teams. We hope it will provide the opportunity to map cross-team dependencies, but also to recognize how all separate team efforts contribute and integrate into the final solution. -KM
These are just a handful of the ways the SCRUM framework allows us to be flexible and adaptable in choosing the processes that make us successful. Give any or all of them a try and find a unique combination that works well with YOUR teams!
