Scrum Certified

This semester has been crazy!

I just got my Scrum fundamentals certification last week. The certification is a requirement for my Project Management class this semester, but I appreciated the opportunity to learn about this type of management framework. I kept thinking about teams I have been part of in the past and how we utilized some of these techniques intuitively. I have also been thinking about how we could have been better if we had known the whole process.

What is Scrum?

Originally, the term Scrum came from rugby. In rugby, a scrum is a method of restarting the game after a pause where the players end up in a giant pile with the opposition and the rugby ball is thrown into the pile. This is a good way to explain the Scrum framework because there’s a series of plays – known as “sprints” – broken up by pauses to share, review, and re-assign tasks. This method was developed in Japan in the 1980s for manufacturing, but the process lends itself particularly well to software development.

The Six Principles of Scrum

SCRUM has six main principles that guide the phases, processes, and methods used.

• Empirical Process Control – Decisions are made based on observations and experiments. Although “gut” decisions have their place, this framework emphasizes having good reasons to do anything.
• Self-Organization – Roles and tasks are assigned to those who want them, within business justification limits. This principle operates on the assumption that employees are self-motivated and will perform better when they are in control of their own task list.
• Collaboration – Collaboration is more than just cooperation. Teammates can play off each other and ultimately make a better final product than if they worked independently.
• Value-Based Prioritization – This is the principle that focuses on maximizing business value. Items are sorted on three characteristics. Tasks are sorted first by maximum business value, then by risk, and finally by dependency.
• Time Boxing – This principle is my favorite because this is the principle that minimizes both multi-tasking and gold-plating. Time boxing prevents multi-tasking by not allowing new tasks to be added to list until the next sprint. On the other hand, work will always fill the time allowed, so limiting the length of the sprint helps reduce over-engineering as well.
• Iterative Development – Iterative development is a very important driver of the SCRUM process. Because SCRUM is an Agile process, the focus is on short bursts with reviews with stakeholders. This helps problems get caught early and allow features to be built out exactly as needed.

What I liked about Scrum

I personally love this framework. As I mentioned above, some of these principles have come intuitively to the teams I have worked on. The best team I was part of relied on self-organization, collaboration, and empirical process control the most. We often took initiative to double-check each other’s work and offer solutions to common mistakes. Our team took a process that was resulting in several errors per shipment and streamlined it. Our error count dropped to only one or two a month. Although our team did use timeboxing a little bit (limited when the last orders for a specific shipment could be placed), I could see more benefit to limiting access to our team for dedicated parts of the day so that the main work of filling orders could have been completed with less interruption.

Ultimately, I look forward to a future workplace where I can experience the Scrum framework in action. Leave me a comment telling me what kinds of Agile framework you have used!