With Scrum through the Crisis
Everyone is talking about the financial crisis today. Can Scrum help organizations through it or any other crisis? I strongly believe that it can! Here my top 3 arguments:
#1 Scrum is pure lean management.
#2 Scrum is continuous crisis management.
#3 Scrum is Agile organization development.
#1 Scrum is pure lean management.
More than ever, in a crisis an organization has to focus on its core business which produces the highest value. It is widely accepted that lean management is one of the most appropriate ways of doing this, not only for manufacturing organizations. The basic principle of lean is continuously removing waste which is not contributing to the product value.
Scrum is based on this lean principle. Scrum continuously reduces the waste in software product development. Let’s see how Scrum eliminates the waste types overproduction and inventory:
Overproduction in software development means extra or unnecessary features. The famous 80/20 rule is also true for software products: 20% of the features are creating 80% of the product value. Beyond that, many features of software products are never or seldom used and these have to maintained throughout the complete product life-cycle.
Scrum eliminates useless or valueless features with the strict order of the Product Backlog, which lists the features according to their value. Product development can stop as soon as the customer is satisfied with the product value achieved because the team is finishing the product feature by feature, according to the order of the Product Backlog.
Requirement documents in software development are what we know in lean management as inventory. They do not directly contribute to the value of the product. The objective of product requirements is to create a common understanding between the customer and the development team about what the product should be. Investing too much effort in requirements is considered to be a form of waste because they might change during implementation. Investing too little effort in requirements may result in delivered features which do not match customer expectations. Finding the right balance between both is the crucial point.
Scrum teams create or break down requirements just-in-time, together with the customer. The investment in a requirement correlates with its priority. The teams and the customer decide how detailed requirements have to be, based on their needs and project circumstances. This is how Scrum balances the effort required in documenting requirements.
So, as we can see, Scrum keeps the organization lean. This not only works on a team level, it also works on a management and executive level. But first let’s see why Scrum can be seen as continuous crisis management, too.
#2 Scrum is continuous crisis management.
An organization can survive a crisis if it is used to crises. It needs to create habits to act competently in extreme situations. Only permanent training of such extreme situations can build up these habits. Scrum is a training program which continuously brings teams to the edge of chaos and lets them learn by themselves. This can only happen successfully and without damage if someone experienced in leading self-organized teams protected them and give the guidance to them. In Scrum we call these role ScrumMaster.
Nobody can explain this better than “Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka” in “The New New Product Development Game”, a research paper in the Harvard Business Review, which is known as one of the roots of Scrum. Takeuchi and Nonaka have observed a built-in instability in Scrum teams. Broad and challenging goals and objectives give them a wide measure of freedom but these also create tension. Subtle control is necessary to prevent the teams from chaos. The Scrum flow with its ceremonies of Planning Meetings, Daily Meetings, tracking progress with a Burn-Down-Graph, Reviews and Retrospective Meetings is exactly this kind of control mechanism for the teams, facilitated by the ScrumMaster.
Thus Scrum teams are ready to deal with extreme situations at any time and are able to act fast if this is demanded by the situation. A key asset for surviving a crisis. But how can we put a large organization in position where it is ready to cope with a crisis?
#3 Scrum is Agile organization development.
Agile and Scrum are based on principles which are often in contradiction with today’s principles and habits of traditional organizations. To benefit from Scrum in a crisis it is crucial that the whole organization follows Agile and Scrum principles. In other words: Scrum teams need to be embedded in an Agile organization.
The good news is that you do not need anything new to develop this Agile organization. Scrum can be used for this, too. Scrum is a generic facilitation process used not only to run complex IT projects, to develop software products or to arrange a wedding celebration, but also to carry out improvements and changes in an organization. As Scrum is lean it will not add anything to the organization; instead, it will continuously improve the existing organization. The basic mechanism behind the scene which makes these happen is the inspect and adapt loop of Scrum which is usable for nearly every environment.
However, Scrum is often a huge challenge for all employees, including management and the executives of an organization, as it means changing fundamental habits and management practices. But, over time, people get used to working in a self-organized way using the inspect and adapt cycle. The organization will change and adapt faster to the market and economic situation. The organization is Agile and ready to survive any crisis.
