7 ways to tell if Scrum works for you
Does Scrum work for you or is it the other way around?
One way to tell if Scrum works for your team is, they are able to do twice the work in half the time or as it has been morphed now, teams are able to create twice the value in half the time.
If your teams can indeed do twice the work or create twice the value in half the time, there is no question — Scrum is indeed working for you! However, I don’t believe teams will ever be able to do twice the work or create twice the value in half the time just because they use Scrum. Scenarios, where this would be true, are if teams are really under-utilized or are highly inefficient before using Scrum. And, the purpose of Scrum is not to do twice the work than what was done before adopting Scrum. The purpose of Scrum is to deliver maximum value, irrespective of the amount of work.
Yes, the advantages and the positives of using Scrum, especially in the world of software development, are many. Reduced time to market, improved software quality, and improved customer satisfaction are some real benefits of using Scrum, but it takes time to measure them. Rather, as a Scrum Master or a manager, you can tell if Scrum is indeed working for you if you notice these changes.
- Managers have more time to focus on strategic, longer-term objectives — As teams learn to become more self-organized and self-managed, they independently start making more and more tactical decisions. When teams make their own decisions like who works on what, when, and how, managers become free to focus on issues that are critical but not burning (just yet).
- Collaboration and interactions in the team increase — As teams get the hang of self-management, they experience the power of being empowered. Teams start collaborating more than ever before, both, within and with other Scrum teams. This speeds up issue resolutions, improves dependency management, etc.
- Problems and bottlenecks start to bubble up — Processes that supposedly worked prior to Scrum now start throwing up issues. These were latent and hidden issues that never surfaced before. As teams address these issues, the overall process becomes much more efficient.
- Developers have a better understanding of the product and how and why it is used — Scrum pushes teams to move away from silos and encourages them to focus on goals, and as Scrum Teams start focusing on Sprint Goals, they start better understanding why the goals matter to their customers. They learn to ask more relevant questions about how and why customer use their product, and in the process learn a lot more about how their software makes a difference.
- Increases the sense of ownership — When teams start seeing the benefits of Scrum, they understand why their work matters. And since they start making decisions, they have a sense of pride and ownership in their work.
- Testing becomes the responsibility of the entire Scrum Team —When the entire Scrum Team talks about software quality, you can be sure that Scrum is indeed working for your team!
- Sprint cadence becomes more natural and less stressful — When teams start using Scrum, they have a hard time figuring out how much they can deliver in each Sprint. More often than not, they underestimate and can’t deliver to their “plan”, which makes moving to Scrum extremely stressful. But as teams learn to identify and create value Sprint after Sprint, the cadence feels more natural.
If you notice any of these changes, you can be sure that the teams are indeed getting value out of Scrum, regardless of whether your customers are getting any direct value from it. Heck, even if customers don’t get tangible new value like the features that they really desire, they will surely gain from the indirect value in the form of better quality and more reliable software.
a high quality you already know the answer to what your customers prefer the most — more number of features or high quality and more reliable software!
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