Why SCRUM?
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What is Scrum?
It is a better way of building Products. Scrum is a lightweight framework to organize work of a team of professionals who's goal is to create product which meet needs of their users. Giving possibility to use Product on early stage. Gathering feedback and improving the product all the way during its development cycle ensure it will meet the users actual needs. It is easy to understand and hard to implement.
Why Scrum?
Scrum helps to save time and money. It is a minimal formal way to organize a team of professionals. It gives a suggestions about do's and don't. Scrum became very popular - it has strong community which helps to find answers on questions.
How people work in SCRUM?
SCRUM have its guide where you can find answers for most questions of the questions. It is free and easy to follow. You can find it here.
People starts work on a Scrum Planning session (2 hours for one week cycle of work called Sprint and respecitvely more for longer Sprints).
Development team meet each day at the same time and the same place (if remotely online of course) and they share:
what they did in last 24 hours
what are they are planning to do in next 24 hours
whether they have any obstacles in achieving a planned goal and if they peers can help them out to overcome them.
Meeting shouldn't take more than 15 minutes a day.
How much time SCRUM consume?
Straight to the point Scrum consume about 14% of team capacity. This is not a waste - it is part of communication and planning of the project. During that time team works on tasks regarding the project.
It is time invested in
nurturing the requirements,
design of a product,
planning,
communication between peers and other stakeholders.
improvements of the product
Some people are experienced working with Scrum. Some people are not. What can you hear about SCRUM?
Good:
It helps team to self organise and prevent micromanagement from their superiors
It helps develop new skills (T-shaped. The vertical bar of the T refers to expert knowledge and experience in a particular area, while the top of the T refers to an ability to collaborate with experts in other disciplines and a willingness to use the knowledge gained from this collaboration.)
It is proven way of organization and communication of work with business peers
Easy to understand
It squeeze meetings to minimum needed (gives also answers how much time to spent)
Access to many source of knowledge, experts, good practices.
Wide community of practicioners give possibility to discuss many challenges
Bad:
Hard to master
It needs time and patience to start seeing benefits of using it
If your professional background is very formal there is highly possible that you will not find a straight answers for the questions at first.
It gives autonomy which if used in wrong direction it can work against.
If you try to use only part of it - it will not work. All or nothing - as they say...
When SCRUM does work?
When whole company (especially higher management) understand scrum well. Whole mindset and approach shall be agile and are aware of constant change in business environment and possibility to adaption to ever changing environment. Transparency, inspection and adaptation shall be shared values.
When SCRUM doesn't work?
If management doesn't use and understand SCRUM and want to modify parts of it
If team doesn't understand or believe in values of using scrum.
If you don't give time to understand and implement it well (get a full speed of a team).
What about budget in SCRUM?
You can have a budget of project. You shall start on analysis on scope of the project. Prepare estimations of effort and complexity of tasks and features. Prioritize this list of features and divide it on Sprints and Releases. Having Roadmap of functionalities with costs and deadlines you shall inspect any adapt into derogations.
Is there any control in SCRUM?
Yes it is. Stakeholders are invited to Sprint Review where team is presenting the outcomes of work. Everyone can give a comments and remarks to Product Owner.
Who uses SCRUM?
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Adobe, Nokia, Siemens, BBC, CNN, General Electric work in SCRUM to name a few. List is much longer and many more companies takes benefits of using it.
Where I can find out more about SCRUM?
Here you an find a Scrum book https://www.scrum.org/scrum-guide.html
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