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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

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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.