Joshua Barnes
Scrum is agile adopts certain principles and practices that have a greater impact on project success than traditional project management models. It is a necessary guide for organizations and project management practitioners who want to implement Scrum and as well as already doing so, who want to make needed improvements in their process.
It is based on experience drawn from numerous projects across a variety of organizations and industries. So, let us now see the six popular frameworks in agile project management.
There are six frameworks in agile project management. They are as follows:
- Scrum
- Kanban
- Lean Kanban
- Crystal
- Lean Development
- XP
Scrum is the most famous framework in agile.
What is Scrum in agile? Scrum is an agile framework that is a collaborative effort for developing and delivering complex jobs to create a new product, service, or other results as defined.
Constraints of: impact all projects
- Scope
- Time
- Cost
- Quality
- Resources
- Organizational ability
- Other limitations
The above constraints make it difficult to plan, manage and execute and ultimately succeed.
However, successful implementation of the results of a finished project provides significant business benefits to an organization.
Therefore, organizations need to select and practise an appropriate project management framework. And this is where Scrum comes in.
Scrum is one of the most popular agile frameworks. It is an adaptive, iterative, fast, flexible, and effective methodology. The scrum framework design helps you deliver significant value quickly and throughout the project.
Moreover, Scrum ensures transparency in communication. It creates an environment of collective accountability and progress.
The scrum framework is structured so that it supports product and service development in all types of industries and in any type of product, irrespective of its complexity.
Why is Scrum better than other project management techniques?
Scrum is better than other project management techniques because it is cross-functional, self-organized, and empowered teams. Particularly, it divides their work into short and concentrated work cycles, called sprints.
Therefore, sprints are short periods in which a certain amount of work must be done.
Scrum Project Flow:
The scrum cycle begins with the sprint planning meeting. In the sprint planning meeting, high-priority user stories are considered for inclusion in the sprint. It creates a project vision. The product owner then develops a prioritized product backlog. It contains a prioritized list of business and project requirements written in the form of user stories.
A sprint generally lasts between one and six weeks. It involves the scrum team working for product increments during the sprint.
Short, highly focussed daily standup meetings are conducted where team members discuss daily progress.
Toward the end of the sprint, a sprint review meeting is held. During which the product owner and relevant stakeholders are provided with a demonstration of the deliverables.
The product owner accepts the deliverable only if they meet the pre-defined acceptance criteria.
The retrospect sprint meeting with the team discusses ways to improve processes and performance as they move forward in the subsequent sprint.
How Fast and Scalable is Scrum?
Scrum teams should ideally have six to 10 members. That may be the misconception that the scrum framework can only be used for small projects. But that is not so.
Scrum can easily be scaled or effectively used in large projects. In a situation when the scrum team size exceeds ten members.
Multiple Scrum teams can be formed. That definitely raises a question as to who facilitates the coordination among multiple scrum teams. And the answer is the convene Scrum of the scrum process. It not only facilities coordination among scrum teams but also enables effective implementation on larger projects.
Additionally, larger and complex projects are often implemented as part of a program or portfolio.
You can apply the scrum framework to manage programs and portfolios.
The logical approach of the guidelines and principles in this framework can be used to manage projects of any size, spanning geographies and organizations. Such large projects may have multiple scrum teams. All are working in parallel makes it necessary to synchronize and facilitate the flow of information and communication.
It is accomplished in the Scrum of scrums.
Scrum of Scrums:
We have heard the Scrum of scrums several times. What is it? Scrum of scrums is the process of ensuring the synchronization between various scrum teams needed in a large project.
The various scrum teams are represented in this meeting, and the objectives are to provide updates about:
- Progress
- Discuss challenges faced during the project
- Coordinate activities.
There are no set rules regarding the frequency of these meetings.
The factors determine the frequency or the amount of inter-team dependency, project size, scrum guidance body recommendations, and level of complexity.
Why Do We Use Scrum | Top 12 Key Benefits
Let us see some of the key benefits of using Scrum in any project.
1. Adaptability:
Adaptability is the very first benefit of using Scrum. The scrum principles are empirical process control, and iterative delivery makes projects adaptable and open to incorporating change when it occurs.
Most importantly, Scrum is customer-centric. It adds to the business values of having a collaborative approach that includes stakeholders. It ensures a customer-oriented framework in a scrum-controlled project.
2. Continuous Delivery of Value:
Continuous delivery of value is an additional benefit that results from being customer-centric in Scrum iterative processes.
In Scrum, iterative processes enable the continuous delivery of value to the ship deliverable process.
Each sprint produces a potentially shippable product, service, or the desired result.
3. Early Delivery of High Value:
Early delivery of high value is closely related to business benefits.
The prioritized product backlog ensures that the highest value requirements of customers are satisfied.
4. Continuous feedback:
Both the customer and the project team benefit from continuous feedback.
Therefore, continuous scrum feedback is provided through the conduct of daily standup and demonstrating and validating sprint processes.
5. Transparency:
Continuous feedback contributes to another key benefit, i.e. transparency.
Transparency in a scrum-managed project. All information centres such as the scrum board and sprint burnout chart are continually displayed and updated. It leads to an open environment.
Particularly, scrum adaptability and transparency create an environment of continuous improvement.
As the project progresses, the deliverables improve progressively sprint by sprint.
Therefore, with the changes in improvement, it is being managed by the groom prioritized product backlog process.
6. Sustainable pace:
Another important benefit is sustainable pace. The scrum process is designed to work at a pace so that they can sustain themselves indefinitely.
Moreover, another benefit of using Scrum is an efficient development process. Therefore, in Scrum, we realize that timeboxing and minimizing non-essential work leads to higher efficiency levels.
7. Motivation:
The next benefit is motivation.
Therefore, conducting daily standup and retrospect, sprint processes lead to greater motivation among employees.
8. Faster problem resolution:
Faster problem resolution is one of the important benefits of using Scrum in projects.
As a result, collaboration and colocation of cross-functional teams lead to identifying and solving problems quickly.
9. Effective Deliverables:
To demonstrate and validate the process and regular reviews after creating deliverables ensures effective deliverables to the customer.
The approve, estimate, and commit user stories process allows team members to take ownership of the project. Thus, leading to a better quality.
10. High Velocity:
In Scrum, high velocity is another important benefit.
Therefore, a collaborative framework enables high skilled cross-functional teams to achieve their full potential and high velocity.
11. Innovative environment:
The retrospect sprint and retrospect project processes create an environment of introspection, learning, and adaptability.
Moreover, it leads to an innovative and creative work environment.
Final Words:
Have you wondered why Scrum is becoming more popular day by day? Because it is better in many ways as compared to the traditional project management methods. Because you won’t perform and deliver in bulk. Rather you perform in bits or chunks, evaluate in every step and proceed if done with your current user story.
As a result, the team saves time developing and bug solving for issues that arise, delivering in bulk. Therefore, it is rightly said that Scrum delivers the greatest value in the shortest time.
