SCRUM in Agile Planning: Why you need it

Scrum is a methodology that enables development teams to address complicated challenges while simultaneously delivering products that have the best possible value and doing it in a manner that maximizes time and resources.

Several perks are enjoyed by organizations that employ the Scrum methodology in their agile processes.

If that was difficult to understand, you don’t need to worry. The rest of this blog post breaks down all that information into little, tasty, digestible bits.

How Can Scrum Help You?

So here are a few ways Scrum in agile planning helps organizations that choose to adopt it:

Get More Visibility Into Projects

During project execution, team members often adopt a tunnel-visioned approach to completing their tasks during project execution. While this may help them get their work done well, it doesn’t necessarily serve the team’s purpose as much.

This is because specific dependencies may exist between the tasks of one team member and another. As such, if such dependencies are not first cleared off the work log, a team member somewhere has been held up and cannot start or complete his tasks until someone else does.

With Scrum, this tunnel vision and the attendant problems are cleared off the board.

That is because with the daily scrum meetings and the organized chart detailing who is doing what, when, and why, team members can easily understand how their work affects another teammate’s and work towards prioritizing those that need to be done first to make the whole team deliver the project on time.

This brings us right to the next point.

Fast Delivery

This is one of the most significant benefits of Scrum in agile planning. The iterative and incremental nature of its focus on project delivery enables teams to effectively break deliverables down into sprints with attainable objectives.

Team members then channel their efforts into achieving the tasks set out in the sprint and work towards providing a steady release of the product to the customers or product owners, with each delivery building on the functionalities of the previous one while looking to incorporate feedback and suggestions from the end user.

Because of this, each sprint period must have a set of targets that have been clearly defined and are attainable, which are established by the Scrum team during the sprint planning meeting. To set achievable goals, a team must first consider the amount of work they can complete during a given sprint and the amount of work they expect to achieve during that sprint. In the same vein, it must explain how the stakeholders and product owner will receive working value from the product delivery that results from the sprint.

Be More Flexible and Adaptable to Changing Requirements

Teams that utilize Scrum are more open to effecting desired changes within the course of project delivery than those that dont. This is not unrelated to the fact they can receive feedback from the end-user before the entirety of the product is delivered. As such, they can work on tweaking certain features and making the product more aligned with what the product owner requires.

The team generates new backlog items or modifies existing ones to align with the necessary product changes. The Scrum team can make any necessary adjustments during the product backlog meetings up until the point at which these items are moved into the sprint.

During the actual sprint phase, you shouldn’t make any modifications as this can affect how long it would take to complete the sprint.

One way to ensure delivery flexibility is by keeping sprints short and limited to 2 weeks. That way, feedback can be faster and changes made easier.

Team Collaboration

It is well-known that when people collaborate, they can do far more than when they work alone. Collaboration is one of the essential components of a prosperous business.

Companies with trouble operating as a cohesive one will slip further and further behind their competitors.

The Scrum methodology is designed to bring out the best in a group by assisting them in discovering common ways to produce and deliver value.

By creating a setting that encourages open discussion about the project at hand, Scrum emphasizes the value of collaboration among team members.

Sprint reviews, daily stand-ups, and sprint planning meetings give team members chances to discuss ideas and collaborate on finding solutions to problems.

Scrum also gives teams the ability to self-manage and the freedom to determine how to approach their projects and tasks.

Increase Profitability

When implemented correctly, Scrum enables businesses to increase the return on their invested money.

This is related to the fact that Scrum places a higher priority on outcomes as opposed to outputs. To put it more simply, Scrum pushes teams to zero in on what will bring the most value to the client while simultaneously reducing the amount of work that is unnecessary.

By delivering what would be of practical importance to the stakeholders, organizations can begin reaping the rewards right before the final version of the product is even delivered, all while ensuring that whatever won’t provide value is ultimately binned, and resources are not wasted on it.

Conclusion

Scrum in agile planning helps organizations accomplish their projects faster while maximizing the value delivered to stakeholders. One must, however, note that these benefits do not immediately accrue by the sheer application of scrum methodology in name only.

Unless the principles are rightly applied, merely tagging a development team a “Scrum team” won’t necessarily help it perform better. For example, suppose teams constantly fail to achieve the tasks set out in their sprint or fail to work towards providing value to the stakeholder at the end of each iteration.

In that case, it becomes challenging to continue expecting the benefits the organization hopes to enjoy.

That is why investing in the right processes and tools that make Scrum principles possible to operate and abide by is essential. An example of such a solution is Uppwise, a software that enables a company-wide adoption of scrum methodology. It helps teams gain insight into their activity through easy-to-understand Kanban boards, helps teams organize sprints, and provides visibility into what items remain to be achieved for a successful iteration.

With the right team and Uppwise in your corner, you’ve got what it takes to make Scrum work for you.