Jumping into Scrum with Both Feet
Earlier this week, our class started our first group project. Not only was the pressure on to make sure I was embracing the collaborative design process (a fear that completely dissipated because our team is pretty great) but we were going to do a scrum. On the presentation screen, scrum didn’t seem so intimidating, you can see how the process is full of energy and has a foundational structure that everyone on the team adheres to in order to complete a design. Then we started scrum, and it was a completely different experience.
All of the structure in scrum doesn’t really take effect until you have a vision, and getting our vision to emerge from the user stories was a jumbled and confused process. It kind of felt like mentally herding cattle, we know where we’re aiming to direct the cattle in general we’re heading that way. But the herd itself doesn’t follow a grid, some cows want more space, others crowd together, and of course there are those rebellious cows who decide they want to break out of the herd, and you wind up getting distracted by this tangential cow until you get it back into the herd. (Disclaimer: I know nothing about cattle herding) The beginning of scrum was an all day mental cattle herding bonanza. I’d like to think we succeeded because here we are on Thursday sketching out wireframes and synthesizing our user research into final personas. That said, I still catch a glimpse from time to time of that earlier chaos, and I’d be lying if it didn’t make me shudder a little bit before refocusing back on the work at hand.
After that first day, I met for coffee with a product manager at a local company and asked him how their design process goes, mentioning that we were currently doing a scrum. He said that the training he had was structured, straight-forward and logical, and it translated to the projects he did during training. Once he finished training and started working on real projects, he came to the same conclusion: the real life application of design processes is a whole other animal when you have actual moving parts, objectives, and project with weight.
