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Overview
Overview
Scrum is an Agile process that allows self organising teams to focus on delivering the highest business value in the shortest time. It encourages effective team collaboration through having distinct roles within teams as well as a set of meetings to maintain a process as well as learning fast what works (and doesn’t) for your team. Scrum allows teams to get into a rhythm of working in an Agile way.
The key roles are:
- A Product Owner (the person leading the team’s priorities and work)
- The Development Team (the people doing the work)
- A Scrum Master (the person who facilitates everything happening)
The key meetings are:
- Sprint Planning (deciding how much work you can do in the time-frame allowed)
- Daily Stand-Up (15 minute chat each day to talk through how work is progressing)
- Sprint Review/Demo (getting feedback from your stakeholders on what you’ve done)
- Retrospective/Retro (a look back at the sprint to see what can be improved)
Introduction
Introduction
The Scrum Guide says Scrum is …”not a process, technique, or definitive method. Rather, it is a framework within which you can employ various processes and techniques. Scrum makes clear the relative efficacy of your product management and work techniques so that you can continuously improve the product, the team, and the working environment.”
Put simply, it’s an Agile way of working which you can adapt to suit you and your team. Take the bits that work, ditch the parts that don’t work - but the idea is to experiment and try things out as frequently as possible whilst productively getting work out to stakeholders.
So what is Scrum?
So what is Scrum?
Scrum is a framework of Agile. The same principles apply just with some key roles and meetings you should adhere to in order to get the most value. To stick with our house-building analogy from the What is Agile section, the key roles are:
- A Product Owner (the project manager),
- The Development Team (the electricians, plumbers and plasterers)
- A Scrum Master (the site foreman)
These roles are fairly self-explanatory - the Product Owner is responsible for what work needs to be done, the Development Team do this work and the Scrum Master is the team facilitator, ensures the team aren’t blocked by anything and coach them to become self-organising to the point they’re needed less and less on day-to-day problems,
Teams work in periods of time called “sprints” which can range from one week to one month depending on what works for them and their stakeholders. Then the key meetings you need to keep Scrum processes working are:
- Sprint Planning (how much can you do in the time-frame allowed?)
- Daily Stand-Up (15 minutes every day to talk through progress towards the goal)
- Sprint Review/Demo (show off your work and get feedback)
- Retrospective/Retro (talk through what went well and what can be improved)
A great website which goes into more detail on all of the above can be found here.
To start working using Scrum, you need somewhere to put all the work you want to do (called a Backlog) - this can be post-its on a board or software like Trello or Jira. Once you have a good list, you then get the team to review a section of the work. This is likely to involve estimating the tasks in the list - have a look at the Estimating Retro in our Retrospectives section [link to Retros section]. The team then agree what can be achieved in the next sprint. Then off you go!
Again, this diagram is using software development language but a “potentially shippable release” can be anything from a coat of paint in a bedroom to a batch of cakes.
Putting that into practice, a typical 2 weeks could look like:
- Monday: Sprint plan
- Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday: Stand-Ups
- Monday: Stand up & optional Mid-Sprint Review
- Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday: Stand-Up
- Friday: Demo and release product(s), as well as team Retrospective
It’s worth noting that whilst Scrum seems to have a lot of rules and can appear daunting, it’s really all about making small sections of work and having focused goals during a period of time.
Agile Coaches
Agile Coaches
Holiday Extras currently employs three Agile Coaches who can spend time with internal teams to understand how they work. They can then suggest ways that Agile working could benefit them and help them choose the style (e.g. Scrum or Kanban) that works in order to help get the team performing at an even higher level using whatever method fits. Rather than being an integral part of a team they work with, they join for a short period of time to observe, feedback and guide the team to find even better ways of working.
Summary
Summary
Scrum is a powerful framework which has helped teams succeed by breaking down large projects and workloads into smaller sprints of time with really focused goals. It’s a great method to try - give it a go next time you’re decorating a room at home or planning a party; you never know what you could learn.
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