When starting a group project, it’s not always smooth-sailing as members can have different ideas or work ethics compared to their peers. Most times you will have that one member that will want to butt heads with your other coworkers due to an idea difference or reformatting scheme. This will result in loss of efficiency, bad time management, overdue work, etc. Luckily, there’s a certain framework called Scrum which can increase productivity and solve all the issues that were listed above.
Scrum Pillars
Scrum helps teams and organizations find value through adaptive solutions for mind-bogglingly problems. To start, Scrum uses 3 pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Transparency is very important in which teammates must visibly understand the work that you are performing on and to those who are receiving your work. With low transparency, there are bound to be an increase in amount of risk and issues. Transparency enables inspection. Inspection frequently detects any unwanted variance or problems in the project. It’s one step closer to reaching the goals of your progress and preventing undesirables. Inspection enables adaptation. Lastly, adaptation controls the adjustments and removes unacceptable results. Changes must be made immediately to try to minimize deviation from the project’s goal. These pillars are conjoined and without one or the other, Scrum itself will fail.
Values and Teams
A successful use of Scrum depends on people becoming more accessible with five values: Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage. Everyone should be committed to achieve the goals and support each other. The focus must be on the task at hand to make the best possible progress towards the goals. The Scrum team must be open about their work and challenges that they face individually and as a team. They must respect each other as capable people and are respected back. The Scrum team must have the courage to work on tough, difficult problems and show courage to do the right thing. With these five values working, the pillars come naturally to build that trust.
The Scrum team involves a small number of people, typically 10 people or less, consisting of one Scrum Master, one Product Owner, and developers. Every member on the Scrum team is accountable to their own set of tasks.
- The Scrum Master helps the Scrum team by:
- Coaching the team members in self-management and cross-functionality
- Removal of drawbacks to the Scrum Team’s progress
- Ensuring that all Scrum events are positive, productive, and are on-time
2. The Scrum Master helps the Product Owner by:
- Facilitating stakeholder collaboration as requested or needed
- Helping the Scrum Team understand the need for clear and concise Product Backlog items
3. The Product Owner is accountable for Product Backlog management including:
- Ensuring that the Product Backlog is transparent, visible and understood
- Developing and explicitly communicating the Product Goal
- Creating and clearly communicating Product Backlog items
4. The Developers are accountable for:
- Creating a plan for the Sprint and the Sprint Backlog
- Adapting their plan each day toward the Sprint Goal
- Holding each other accountable as professionals
Scrum Events
- Daily Scrums
Daily Scrum is the inspection and progress of the Sprint and whether to adapt the Sprint Goal to the upcoming planned work. Daily Scrums are usually a 15-minute event for the Developers to plan and communicate on what should be done next for the Sprint Goal. Daily Scrums can also set a schedule for the next day on what needs to be worked on. These Daily Scrums are usually done in the beginning or the end of the work-day.
2. Sprint Planning
Sprint Planning initiates the blueprint of how the Sprint should layed out. This is the collaborative effort of the entire team to build out how to reach the Sprint Goal later on.
3. Sprint
The Sprint is considered the heartbeat of Scrum, where the ideas are turned into values. Each of these Sprints can be considered short project which ideally, should be completed in one months time. During a Sprint, the quality does not go down, the Product Backlog is refined if needed, and no changes should be made to disrupt the Sprint Goal. Sometimes when a Sprint takes too long, the Sprint Goal may become obsolete and issues can arise. Another Sprint is starts up immediately after the previous Sprint is concluded.
4. Sprint Review
Sprint Review is the evaulation of Sprint’s progress for that day and determine future adaptations. This is where Developers present their work to the stakeholders to see if any changes for the Product Goals needs to be modified. The Sprint Review shouldn’t be a presentation but a quick recap of what is done, what needs to be done, and what’s next to work on.
5. Sprint Retrospective
Sprint Retrospective analyzes how the last Sprint went in regards to interactions, processes, individuals, etc. The Scrum Team will discuss what worked well during the Sprint, what problems they encountered, and how those problems were (or were not) solved. The Sprint Retrospective concludes the Sprint.
A lot of companies and groups use Scrum today as if effective in many cases and hopefully you can use this information to apply Scrum the next time you work in a group!
