Historically a large proportion of companies have used Prince2 or a derivative for their standard project methodology. However, over recent years the move of companies to a more dynamic and flexible approach to projects has increased. There are a variety of these new approaches e.g. scrum, lean etc., which generally are more about being adaptive.
Scrum is a framework for managing projects that is focused on a flexible holistic strategy where a team works as a unit to reach a common goal as opposed to a "traditional, sequential approach". This method was originally designed for use within application and product development, but can also be used in other areas. Scrum enables the creation of self-organising teams by encouraging co-location of all team members, and verbal communication among all team members and disciplines in the project.
A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called “requirements churn”), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. The focus is on maximizing the team's ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.
There are only three roles involved in this methodology:
• Product Owner – this is the person responsible for the Product Backlog i.e. contents, priorities and availability
• ScrumMaster – this is the equivalent role to a Project Manager from a responsibility prospective, but has major differences in that this is more of the facilitation role rather than a management role
• The Team – is responsible for the process of each iteration during the project and the project itself
Scrum projects generally start with a vision, which might be vague at first, but will then become clearer as the project moves forward. The Product Owner is responsible for delivering the vision that maximises the ROI and formulates the Product Backlog.
The Product Backlog is a list of functional and non-functional requirements for the solution delivery by the project. The Product Backlog is never complete as it evolves from an initial estimate of the requirements through management identifying changes to make the product improvements. The items are then prioritised so that the items can then be grouped into proposed releases.
All work is done in Sprints, which are manageable chunks of work (maybe 2-30 days) where the objective is to get a ship-ready state.
Sprints generally begin with a planning meeting and end with a review meeting.
A Sprint Backlog is a list of tasks to be completed during the sprint and assigned to individuals. These are the actual decomposed items from the product backlog. This list must be agreed to by the entire team prior to the sprint actually beginning.
The Scrum is a short regular meeting, which is quite often daily, where the usual brief is to answer the following three questions:
• What have you done on this project since the last Scrum meeting?
• What do you plan to do on this project between now and the next Scrum?
• What impediments stand in the way of you achieving your commitments to the project?
A Burndown Chart is a monitoring tool, which shows the amount of work remaining across time and is a good way of visualising the correlation between the amount of work remaining at any point and the progress of the Team(s) in reducing this work.
Scrum can be implemented through a wide range of tools. Many companies use universal tools, such as spreadsheets to build and maintain artefact’s such as the sprint backlog. There are also open-source and proprietary packages dedicated to management of products under the Scrum process. Other organisations implement Scrum without the use of any tools, and maintain their artefact’s in hard-copy forms such as paper, whiteboards, and sticky notes.
Should you require any further information on Scrum please do not hesitate to contact us.
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