Sep
22
What are the real benefits of Scrum? Here are three!
Reduced Waste
Scrum encourages the team to maintain a product backlog,which is a list of stories, requirements or issues ranked in order of value to the business. At the end of each sprint, the team will go through the backlog and assign the next highest value items to the sprint.
In a traditional waterfall approach, the business analyst will spend weeks, if not months putting together a Functional Spec. Once the spec is complete, the project and the business will go through a long “approvals” process. Once this document is approved, anything else requested by the business will need to go through an extensive change control process. When working with a consultancy, this can quickly become an expensive process, as this is all additional, out-of-scope work.
Because of the expensive nature of “change requests” and the negativity associated with them, this quickly creates a culture of making sure that “everything including the kitchen sink” is included in the spec. In Scrum, there is no change control process, change is embraced and new requirements will be weighed up against existing ones when planning the next sprint. The business and product owner are actively involved in this process which helps in making sure any features delivered are actually used by the business.
“Industry data shows that about half of the software features developed are never used, development can be completed in half the time by avoiding waste, or unnecessary work.” Scrum Alliance
Increased Innovation
As discussed above, the iterative nature of Scrum reduces waste – but a more exciting benefit is that it encourages innovation!
Traditionally all of the design for a project is done up front – building a great solution this way takes a very insightful business analyst and a customer that is a fantastic communicator. Reality is that often the customer is not used to working in a project environment and finds it hard to visualise how the solution would work in reality.
No matter how experienced the project team or the customer, sometimes the best ideas only come once you are deep in the project and your hands are dirty on from the software. In a traditional approach, this happens once User Acceptance Testing begins.
In Scrum, this happens at the end of the first sprint!! Depending on the value to the business of the new and innovative ideas discovered, they could possibly be built straight into the next sprint. Our traditional approach can stifle innovation with a lengthly change control process – Scrum leads to an agile and creative team building the best solution for the customer.
Increase Visibility
Projects implemented using Scrum are very structured and give a huge amount of visibility to those in and outside the project.
On traditional, plan driven projects the project manager will have certain activities on the plan and once a week, will ask the owner what the status is? 10%, 13%……62% etc. The reality is that the task owner is essentially guessing the status and it is quite difficult to quantity the status.
Scrum uses a much more granular, low-level form of status updating. The team is encouraged to write stories that will not take more than a few days to build. After a developer starts working on a story it is only considered “done” once it is completely built, passed all acceptance tests and theoretically ready for release.
Using a Kanban Wall, as the story moves through statuses – backlog, build, test and then done it becomes very clear, at a glance how the team is tracking. Scrum takes this a step further with the use of Burn Down Charts – which gives a great snapshot of how the team is tracking and is explained in more detail in one of our earlier blogs.
Let’s collaborate
These three points are just a start. Please add any benefits of Scrum you have experienced to the comments – I will then incorporate the feedback into the original article and we can keep iterating!
