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Scrum – Is it confusing? By Sanjeev Varshney
Scrum – Is it confusing?
Yes, it is. Definitely, with so many buzz words like Scrum, Agile,
Kanban, SAFe and god knows what else. It is definitely
confusing. However there is work around to make it easy. If you
start looking step by step at the history Scrum or Agile
methodology, it is not at all hard to understand. Anything and
everything you try, in the beginning, it sounds like confusing.
For an example, if some start learning about programming, he
or she can be easily confused about JAVA Vs JavaScript or C vs
C++, HTML, .Net Framework etc. But if you start looking the
things one by one in organized manner, you will find it quite
interesting and understandable.
Scrum – Is it confusing? By Sanjeev Varshney
At individual level:
What is Scrum?
As per the Wikipedia “Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development framework for managing product development. It defines "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal", challenges assumptions of the "traditional, sequential approach" to product development, and enables teams to self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication among all team members and disciplines involved.
A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during product development, the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements volatility), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an evidence-based empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team's ability to deliver quickly, to respond to emerging requirements and to adapt to evolving technologies and changes in market conditions.”
According to Scrum Alliance: “Scrum is an Agile framework for completing
complex projects. Scrum originally was formalized for software
development projects, but it works well for any complex, innovative
scope of work. The possibilities are endless. The Scrum framework is
deceptively simple. “
What role I want to play with Scrum?
There are roles like Scrum Master, Release Train Engineer with Scrum.
You need to understand what the purpose of each and every role is. You
also want to understand responsibilities of these roles before you pick
what is that you want to play. There are pros and cons with everything
choice. But the beauty of Scrum is, you can switch the role conveniently
as long as you have enough skill set to play that role.
Scrum – Is it confusing? By Sanjeev Varshney
At organization level:
Should we move to Scrum?
We should probably start by defining the basics. “Do what make sense”.
Compare how you are running your project in your organization. Notice
everything, plan, investment, execution, ROI, culture etc. and then do a
pilot using Scrum and then again notice everything like plan, investment,
execution, ROI, culture etc. Compare both the results, I can almost
guarantee you; you will realize you should have done it yesterday.
How long it will take?
It depends, how many projects you have going on? What is the level of
maturity your IT staff has and most importantly how eagerly your staff
want to adopt it and make it passion.
What all are the impacts?
I personally do not see any major impact however as we always see things
get slowdown a bit because of learning curve, you might experience
something similar. But eventually once teams are matured enough you
can see it will pay you back.
Do we need an agile coach?
I suppose it depends on what the people are trying to achieve. It
depends on Agile maturity of an organization. I was reading multiple
articles and I found “Ask an 'agile coach' what he or she does and the answer
could range from write code to run meetings. It's not what you'd necessarily
expect an agile coach to be doing, but that doesn't mean the role is
unnecessary.” Do you want to know how other competitors are taking
advantages? Do you want leverage all benefits of Scrum? Do you want to stay
competitive in industry? If your answer is ‘yes’, that you need an agile coach. If
you think, you do not have a competitor and you and your organization know
enough about Scrum and Agile, then probably you do not need a coach.