How to Improve Team Efficiency Through Scrum
Let’s talk about how Scrum compares to Waterfall project management, what it has in common with Agile, and how you can start using Scrum to keep your projects on time and on budget.
You may have heard of Scrum but aren’t sure what it is or how it benefits the business. Or perhaps you use it but others in your organization don’t understand it.
As a certified Scrum master, I’d like to share a bit about how I’ve used Scrum to transform my work and my team’s working model to improve efficiency, among other things. I truly believe it can help you once you (or others in your organization) understand its purpose and how it’s meant to be applied.
What is Scrum?
Scrum is a project management framework that emphasizes teamwork, accountability and iterative progress toward a well-defined goal. It’s three pillars are transparency, inspection and adaptation.
That’s why the framework begins with a simple premise: Start with what you see or know. After that, track the progress and tweak as necessary.
Essentially, each person using Scrum commits to achieving short-term goals within a designated time frame, welcoming and adapting to change, and working collaboratively.
This, of course, requires openness and transparency with others about work, progress, and issues. Respecting each other’s decisions, experience, and diversity is also critical. Moreover, being courageous is essential, as it takes courage to accept change, take risks, and find optimized solutions. However, if you make this commitment, the benefits can be exponential.
What are Scrum’s Benefits?
I have recognized many benefits of using the Scrum approach for projects. Here are a few of the most notable:
1. Quicker release of a useable product to customers/end users: Scrum allows simultaneous work which enables quicker coding and testing compared to sequential work. Programmers and testers work “on the fly,” making adjustments and testing as they go.
2. A higher-quality product: Scrum helps you define and elaborate on requirements just in time through continuous feedback, which means each person on your team can adjust their work in the moment instead of waiting until the product is done. This keeps product knowledge relevant and enables continuous enhancement as requirements change and new technology features and capabilities emerge. (There is often simultaneous innovation occurring on the baseline platform while you’re iterating on your system/solution. There are also net new technology standards, models, and tools hitting the market every day that you may need or want to incorporate while developing or configuring your solution.)
3. Higher productivity rates and better employee morale: Team collaboration and pair programming lead to faster, higher-quality work. Your development team stays focused on completing prioritized tasks that deliver business value, which fosters a sense of accomplishment and boosts morale.
4. Lower project costs: Scrum delivers value faster than traditional methods and helps to keep labor costs down. You’ll solicit stakeholder feedback early on during sprint reviews, which allows for immediate course corrections and reduces costly changes later in the process. Automation and up-front testing also minimize wasted work and help expedite deployments.
5. Greater ability to incorporate changes as they occur: I’ve mentioned this a couple times already, but I want to put an exclamation point on this benefit. Unlike traditional methods where the project scope is fixed, Scrum allows you to continuously evolve your scope as you test and learn without suffering the typical consequences of scope creep. With Scrum, the time and cost for your project stay constant even if you make changes to the design or build plan.
6. Better user satisfaction: The people who will be using this platform or system to do their jobs will receive useable portions of the completed product quicker. They won’t have to wait for years to get the tools they need right now. Taking an incremental rollout approach also allows for timely feedback to your team so it can ensure the final product meets customer expectations and end-user needs.
7. Improved progress visibility and exposure: Transparency and open communication ensure everyone on your team and the customer side is informed about the project’s status so that the team can accurately identify any issues and predict progress.
8. Maintains focus: The iterative and incremental approach of Scrum helps all teams stay focused on the project goal so you can go-live on time.
If it sounds good so far, let’s talk process – what the experience will be like for everyone involved.
How Does Scrum Work?
Scrum uses short iterations, called sprints, typically lasting no more than two weeks. Each sprint includes four aspects to ensure proper execution:
- Sprint Planning: The team decides what they need to complete in the coming sprint and shares updates or obstacles.
- Daily Scrum: This short standup meeting ensures everyone is on the same page. Team members report on what they did, what they plan on doing and any blockers they face.
- Sprint Review: Team members showcase the work they accomplished during the sprint, celebrate achievements, and gather valuable input.
- Sprint Retrospective: The team reviews their work, identifying what went well and what didn’t go as planned so they can make the next sprint better.
What are the Scrum Roles?
The following roles form the Scrum team:
- Scrum Master: Helps the team skillfully apply Scrum to achieve business value. The Scrum Master is not their manager, project manager, team lead or team representative. Instead, the Scrum Master serves the team by removing impediments, protecting them from outside interference, and helping them adopt Agile development practices.
- Scrum Product Owner: Acts as the customer representative, ensuring the product meets user needs and business objectives. The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing ROI by identifying product features, translating these into a prioritized list for the next sprint and continually re-prioritizing and refining the list. The Product Owner has profit and loss responsibility for the product, assuming it is a commercial product.
- Development team: Cross-functional members who work together to deliver product increments. This team includes software engineers, architects, programmers, analysts, quality assurance (QA) experts, testers, and user interface (UI) designers, all collaborating to achieve sprint goals.
Now, at this point, if you’re familiar with agile, you might be questioning everything I just said.
“This sounds a lot like agile. Are they the same thing? Don’t Scrum Masters drive the agile process?”
This is a common question, and I’m glad you asked.
While they share the same principles, Agile is a project management philosophy while Scrum is the precise framework – the Agile methodology – that you follow to manage the project.
Now you may be asking…
Why Scrum Instead of Waterfall?
One long-lived project management methodology is the Waterfall model, which has dominated software development until recently.
Why the sudden change?
Waterfall’s primary limitation is that it (wrongly) assumes that all the requirements are clearly understood at the beginning of the project. That is rarely the case. As a result of this incorrect assumption…
- Sequential phases don’t accommodate changes easily.
- It’s difficult updating requirements once the project is underway.
- Testing happens too late in the process. That can lead to significant time and budget extensions if bugs are found.
In contrast, Scrum’s iterative and flexible nature allows for continuous feedback, quicker adaptation to changes and higher-quality outcomes.
Think of Scrum as a way for you and your team to accomplish work in small, manageable steps, incorporating continuous experimentation and feedback loops along the way to help you learn. As an Agile framework, it provides just enough structure for you to integrate into your way of working, while adding practices tailored to your specific needs.
Looking to Get Started with Scrum?
The first step is to understand the Scrum framework, as defined in The Scrum Guide, which was introduced in 1995 as a better way for teams to tackle complex problems. I recommend reading insights from Professional Scrum Masters and Trainers (PSTs), who are experts in their field, and exploring resources from Scrum.org to learn how to apply Scrum methodologies to your team.
I’m also happy to answer any questions you may have. You can find me on LinkedIn or email me here.
