We firmly believe that Scrum for improved agility is an ideal way of working and is easy to implement and suitable for most teams. We like to kick-off agile education for a new team with a quick introduction to Scrum. Depending on the team we can skip some of the history but always cover the essential ingredients for success starting with why and then working toward how.
Here we will cover the high-level essentials leaving the finer details to other articles for reference.
Why agile works
Having suffered through the “before-times” myself, I know it works an order of magnitude better than classic waterfall. If you cannot take my word for it though, consider the following real-world contrasts:
| Waterfall | Agile |
|---|---|
| Long monolithic schedule full of wishful thinking that was created in a back room somewhere by people that think they know the customer. | Small regular releases full of prioritized features that were validated & estimated by the people doing the work. |
| A static list of product features cast in stone early on in the project that may not be relevant in the end. | Dynamic list of features based on customer input that is continually updated & prioritized based on customer feedback. |
| Separate and expensive role-based teams to handle the various aspects of the work (design, dev, test, release, …) | Fully cross-functional team(s) that is/are self-contained and can do it all. |
| An inflexible plan that cannot tolerate delays or mistakes resulting in technical debt to be dealt with later or more likely never. | Flexible plan allowing for small slices of functionality to be delivered along with corrections and other adjustment to improve continually. |
Important Terms
- Definition of Ready
- Definition of done
- Acceptance criteria
- Backlog
- User Story
- Task
- Epic
- Metrics
- Story Points
The events involved
- Sprint Planning
- Sprint Retrospective
- Sprint Demo
- Daily Stand-up
- Backlog refinement
The agile players
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Product Owner | The person with the vision and the decision authority to decide what will be done and when it will be delivered. |
| Scrum Master | The person that knows agile very well who has the mission to help the team master the process and become more agile. This person will often do it all (but the backlog and actual dev work) in the beginning but eventually will fade to the background as the team(s) gain maturity. |
| Agile team members | Ideally these are the cross-functional team(s) populated with the people doing the work during each sprint. |
When scaling is needed
At it’s core Scrum was intended for small independent teams working in isolation. This is rarely the case these days with large scale projects involving multiple teams working on a similar related mission to deliver something much larger and more complex. What that is the case scaling agile involved a few more elements to ensure proper alignment and coordination when it comes to dependencies and complications.
Some external links to explore:
We have been with Agile ways of working like Scrum from the beginning. As such we firmly believe that Scrum for improved agility increases performance at all levels. Increased performance helps to reduce several aspects of risk liberating more capacity to grow and innovate. Drop us an email or book a free consultation to learn more about how NRM can help you leverage business agility methods like Scrum to improve performance while reducing business risk.
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