I was leading a software project and the deliverables were not completed on time again. Everyone who has managed projects knows how difficult is to manage and deliver projects on time and on budget. That is sounds familiar to any of you.
I was thinking about the root cause of failure, the project team was right balance between senior and junior members who have been working together for almost two years; we have support of the directors and business managers but what about our project management methodology.
After decades of software engineering and traditional methodologies we still face the same problems. One of the main reasons of our project have failed is that we have just applied predictive methodologies in every type of project. We make detailed plans; try to identify every aspect, risk and work packages at the start especially in complex projects. In others words, we have managed all of our projects based on predictive processes.
As regards the most appropriate response to this situation, Scrum came out based on empirical processes for increasing the probability of successfully managing project. Scrum is a leading agile methodology. It is used by enterprise and startup companies around the world.
Scrum
Potentially shippable increment of the product
According to Ken Schwaber, one of the founders of Scrum said it can be described by thinking of how a house is built. The buyer cannot move into the house until the house is completed, assuming that there was an incremental iterative approach for home construction. Using this approach, the house was built room by room. The plumbing, electrical and infrastructure would be built in the first room and then extended to each room as it was constructed. Buyers could move in as soon as they had decided that enough rooms had been completed. Therefore, additional rooms could be constructed according to the buyer’s needs. Scrum allows the buyer to have software built in this way. As the house is deployed, pieces of the functionality are delivered to buyers so that their organisations can start using parts of the application early in the development cycle.
The product is built incrementally in a series of short time periods called sprints. The sprint lasts between 1 to 4 weeks.
Concise Documentation
Scrum guides the creation of that product, with a focus on business value and high visibility of progress. The scrum core has few pages that are easy to read and understand in a short time.
On the other hand, the classical project management methodologies have an extensive documentation to read before starting to use them. The PMBOK has over 400 pages and the book of management successful projects with Prince2 has over 300 pages. It should require some training days to know and understand them.
Scrum roles and responsibilities
Scrum Master
• Coach: an agile coach for the development team and the product owner. He trained, remove impediments and improve the productivity.
• Servant Leader: Servant First then Leader. Listen to your team; do not make judgments that create barrier between you and your team. A servant leader asks “what can I do today to help you and the team to be more effective? Instead of asking “what are you going to do for me?
Product Owner
• Release level economic: The PO continuously make trade-offs in scope, date, budget and quality at the release level. For example identify new features that would increase the revenue en 20%, decide to not fund the next spring for over budget or market condition.
• Groom the product backlog: creating, refining, estimating and prioritizing product backlog items.
• Collaborate with the stakeholders: PO works closely with the internal stakeholders( business owner, executive, program manager, marketing) and external stakeholders(partners, customers)
Development team
• Plan the spring: team help to establish the goal, determines which high priority product backlog items to build to achieve the goal.
• Perform sprint execution: design, develop and test the product backlog items into increments of potentially shippable functionality.
Conclusion
The scrum is very useful to manage complex projects. One of the big advantages is delivering features to the business departments and users in a short time calls sprint between 1 and 4 weeks. After applying scrum in our project, we delivered releases every 4 weeks instead of 5 or 6 months. The business stakeholder’s satisfaction has increased and we have adjusted some delivery to the time to market very well. Another one is the continuous improvement of the process in every spring. The team knows the framework, get better in every spring and find new ways to improve. However, it is not a silver bullet that rescues and makes any projects succeed. In order to apply, first we should know the scrum frameworks then tailor it to our organisations.
References
- Kenneth S. Rubin. Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process. Addison-Wesley Professional 2012
- Ken Schwaber. Agile Project Management with Scrum. Microsoft Press 2004.
- https://www.scrumalliance.org
