What You Need To Know About Scrum
Scrum is a problem-finding framework. It solves only a small subset of the problems you will encounter as you develop a complex product. When doing complex work, much is unknown; many things will change, and there is often no single and straightforward answer about what to do and how to do it. Scrum sets you up with a way of finding and dealing with the issues you will encounter. Scrum helps spotlight your biggest challenges, problems and risks that will prevent you from delivering a valuable product. Scrum is designed to help you discover and deal with these issues early and often. This, in turn, allows you to lower risk and start eliminating problems early and often rather than later when time is more limited and pressure is higher.
The rules of Scrum act like a safety bumper, protecting you from significant risks as you do complex work. Scrum requires teams to work in short cycles (Sprints) and reevaluate and replan each Sprint to take advantage of new insights and learnings.
Scrum is simple to learn but challenging to master. The analogy of Chess can be used to explain this concept better. The rules of chess are simple to learn; however, playing Chess to a high level is incredibly difficult and takes a lifetime to master. Scrum is similar.
Scrum is a different way of working and requires people to let go of some of the established “best practices” and ways of working from the past. This cannot be easy. The challenge of changing people’s beliefs and long-established habits should not be underestimated.
Scrum requires a Done & Usable Increment by the end of each Sprint. This may not be easy to achieve for new Scrum Teams. That is natural, normal and the whole point! By discovering the difficulties early, we can work to remove them.
It is better to discover issues early in the development effort, so there is time and options available to deal with them. Persevere, keep going and keep improving. This is the whole point of Scrum! Scrum is about learning how to get Done earlier and exposing the issues that prevent us from doing this so we can collaborate to overcome them. It is not intended to be easy or not to require any changes other than the introduction of Scrum to resolve long-lived issues.
Producing Done Increments each Sprint enables Agility, maximises options, limits waste, lowers risk and allows a Scrum Team to deliver value early and often. All of this is critical to success when doing complex work.
Scrum is deliberately lightweight and incomplete. It will not be enough to enable you to build complex products. As you proceed, you will need to add appropriate practices and tools to create your own process. Scrum is a starting point and not the result. Use Scrum to create, adapt and improve your process and working methods.