Agile SCRUMBAN - Utopia & new era in Worldwide Portfolio Management for Maintenance projects across industries & verticals

What is SCRUMBAN?

It is a software development model which is combination of scrum and kanban. Scrumban is considered for maintenance projects in which there are frequent changes or unexpected user stories. It can reduce the minimum completion time for user stories.

Scrumban is a framework for overcoming common challenges with scaling Scrum across an Enterprise. We are using JIRA Agile tool.

Drawbacks of SCRUM

In a Nutshell,Scrum commonly does not do well around

- Nature of work--‐ specifically --‐ It’s arrival, it’s unpredictability

- Longer term considerations such as architecture

- Addressing psychological barriers in implementation

- Product owner role effectiveness and scale

- Scaling constructs unreliable beyond the team

- Sprint ‘Commitments’ relationship to Market Risks

- Longer term quality considerations

- Deterministic planning

- Share ownership emergence

- Reliance on top down/vertical buy‐in with affirmations of servant leadership.

At detailed level,

Disadvantages of Scrum

While Scrum offers some concrete benefits, it also has some downsides. Scrum requires a high level of experience and commitment from the team and projects can be at risk of scope creep. 

Here are the disadvantages of Scrum?: 

• Risk of scope creep: Some Scrum projects can experience scope creep due to a lack of specific end date. With no completion date, stakeholders may be tempted to keep requesting additional functionality. 
• Team requires experience and commitment: With defined roles and responsibilities, the team needs to be familiar with Scrum principles to succeed. Because there are no defined roles in the Scrum Team (everyone does everything), it requires team members with technical experience. The team also needs to commit to the daily Scrum meetings and to stay on the team for the duration of the project.
• The wrong Scrum Master can ruin everything: The Scrum Master is very different from a project manager. The Scrum Master does not have authority over the team; he or she needs to trust the team they are managing and never tell them what to do. If the Scrum Master tries to control the team, the project will fail.
• Poorly defined tasks can lead to inaccuracies: Project costs and timelines won’t be accurate if tasks are not well defined. If the initial goals are unclear, planning becomes difficult and sprints can take more time than originally estimated.

 Scrumban: Amplify Scrum

- A framework for evolutionary change and continuous improvement.

Four familiar principles of Scrumban.

 - Start with SCRUM you already do

- Agree as a Scrum team to pursue incremental changes to improve the way you work

- Respect the Scrum Master, Product Owner and other current roles

- Encourage acts of leadership at all levels

Key Enablers

- Trust in the workers and the system

- Mapped the Value Stream

- Analyzed Flow, Visualized External Dependencies

- Captured Objective Data and Negotiated SLEs

Advantages of Scrumban

- Emphasis on systems thinking and understanding of current context helps assure teams and organizations don’t just blindly apply prescribed roles and ceremonies.

- Active risk recognition and management improves ability to attack highly variable work items early.

- Expanded opportunities to build trust through probabilistically determined SLEs vs. just a Sprint commitment.

- Core principles of “start with what you do now” and “respect current roles and responsibilities” minimizes psychological barriers.

- Preference for evolutionary vs. revolutionary change minimizes disruption.

- No longer reliant on individual capabilities of Product Owner. Risk and economic prioritization is visualized and can be actively managed at every phase of the value stream.

- Not all systems are created equal, and sometimes the right size falls outside of Scrum’s recommended 3‐9 persons limit.

- Visual board radiates status.

- Emphasis on the flow of work over the activities of individual workers mitigates risk of meaningless conversations on status.

- Additional practices and mechanics allow teams to effectively collaborate from diverse geographic locations.

- Scrumban aids in building trust.

 Key Scrumban Terms

- Work Backlog – Equivalent to Scrum’s Product Backlog with minor differences for how Workitems are tracked.

- Workitem – The individual descriptions of functionality needed by the business that either define enhancements or defects.

- Workline – The series of stages in the software development process that pull work from the Work Backlog and produce shippable business value.

- Stages – The common and discrete steps required to deliver software within an organization.