What is SCRUM?
Why do we want to master it?
Over the last year, we’ve been on a journey to refine our project management process. While clients have a great experience with our team, project inefficiencies can compound. Much like the crack in a windshield, small gaps can become big problems very quickly.
In the fall of 2016, we brought someone in to work with me and Josh, to document our current workflow. The work was stunning but the process revealed some obvious flaws. The largest of which was the lack of fail-safes. The status and progress of many small projects lived in the mind (and email inbox) of one person. Moving our clients into Slack with our team yielded positive results immediately.
Fast forward through months of searching, hiring some into a poorly defined position, followed by months of introspection and research… we found Scrum. Or maybe it found us?
As we were trying to get a better understanding of how other teams manage projects, our friends at Standard Code mentioned Scrum and the impact it had on their team. A book recommendation (Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland), audible purchase, and a few days later Josh and I agreed this was exactly what we needed.
What is this Scrum you speak of?
The idea behind Scrum is simple: a framework that allows teams to deliver new features of a product every 2–4 weeks.
Within the Scrum framework, large projects are divided into smaller chunks of time called ‘sprints’. Sprints are time-boxed to no more than a month-long, most commonly two weeks.
Scrum encourages Sprint Planning meetings at the start of the sprint, where teams determine how many User Stories — statements that paint a full picture of a specific feature — they can accomplish in the allotted time.
Each day of the sprint, team members attend a daily Scrum meeting, known as a Stand-Up. This meeting should last no more than 15 minutes. In the stand-up, team members share what they worked on the day before, will work on that day, and identify any issues that may be blocking progress.
What are the benefits of scrum?
Scrum addresses the complexity of a given project by making progression transparent. Team members can inspect and change based on current conditions, rather than try to anticipate the outcome of a project. This allows teams to address the common dangers of more traditional processes like the Waterfall method, as well as the chaos that comes from constantly changing requirements, oversight in estimating time, resources and cost, and compromises on software quality. Total transparency of standards is required in Scrum development to ensure that what is being delivered meets what is expected.
If you’d like to read more about why we use Scrum, take a look at the framework’s manifesto.
