Scrum you!

Things to consider before entering the todo-list era…

Scrum did not work for us!

So you’ve tried it and you maybe have failed. Scrum did not work for you. The quick conclusion is that there is something fundamentally wrong with the Scrum process. It would be otherwise applicable to your organization and team — only if it did not enforce things like:

• Backlog grooming instead of just having a clear release plan
• Sprint planning instead of just doing the necessary tasks
• Writing of user stories instead of clean and compact requirements
• Daily standup meetings instead of just following the list of tasks to be done
• Sprint reviews instead of just performing continuous integration and releasing
• Sprint retrospectives instead of updating the list of tasks to be done and focusing on the next set of tasks…

At the end of the day, you are becoming more and more convinced that simple todo-list would be just fine for your needs.

Really? Let’s consider a few things about scalability, the big picture and perspectives.

Scalability

If you have a small team (like 1-2 persons), you might well be able to organize your work as todo-lists and have things running smoothly. But what happens when the size of your team becomes bigger? Or you have more than one team? Or when your goal is to expand your business so that the number of teams is approximately ten fold by the end of the year?

Or when you just want to understand the status of your “product roadmap” in a higher level — not having just a stack of todo-lists?

Further, how does your teams coordinate their work? Have you already considered hiring a person, who’s responsibility is to make sure that all teams have their todo-lists synchronized?

The big picture

How do you effectively communicate your product vision and strategy to your teams that are using todo-lists? How do you make sure that the teams understand the big picture? How do you create a link between the product roadmap and the todo-lists? Do you have a product roadmap? Why would I, we already know what our proudct is going to be!

The perspective

How do you measure your teams’ performance? Why would you event want to measure it — you’ve just hired the most talented people around. The short answer is — you need to be able to keep different stockholders up-to-date on the progress on your product creation process. Do you settle having a view to your product development process as being a set of things stated as “tasks to-do” or “recently completed tasks”?

Would you rather be able to see the big picture from the perspective that is most relevant to you?

The product backlog

I’ve previously blogged about the importance of having a product backlog. Not just to have an old school “requirements document” but to have clear, written statements about your product. These statements have a purpose and they add value.

The purpose states facts about your product features and gives your a deeper understanding what the intended product is. Typically it is about your users and how they will use your product. The product backlog gives you an answer to the question “What is the value that our product brings to our customers and what problem does our product help to solve?”

Would you rather see the value of your product described as a cohesive set of descriptions than a list of todo-items?

Yes, me too.

It’s quite simple, isn’t it.