Common Challenges Faced by the Teams while following Scrum
Furqan Ud Din
Project Manager | Scrum Master | Agile Practitioner | Agile Project Management | Certified Agile Coach | Experienced EdTech Industry Professional | QA Manager
In this world of Agile transformation, software companies are increasingly inclined toward implementing Agile methodologies across organizations. It's a great step to move from conventional models towards adopting agile techniques which not only results in reducing costs but also helped the teams to provide better transparency to the clients during actual software development.
In this article, I'll be covering the most common challenges faced by the teams while following Scrum (a commonly used agile framework). I've experienced these challenges while implementing scrum across different teams in the world of software development. You might find this article helpful in the sense that it not only mentions your pain points but also helped you to realize that it's common across the software industry.
Some of the commonly faced challenges are:
Lack of knowledge and training sessions (about the process, estimations, code deployment, the definition of ready not met, etc.); though management is passionate to start following scrum methodology one of the most commonly faced challenges is not having appropriate knowledge and prior training of team members. I use to ask different professionals about scrum during the interviews i-e what is scrum? what do you know about scrum? what are scrum ceremonies? what do you know about the scrum team? who all are part of the scrum team etc.? It came to me a huge surprise when they answer that scrum is daily standup or a sprint for them, they are not aware of the ceremonies or scrum team but they still claim that they are following scrum. When asked if they have gone through scrum guidelines or some sort of training, the answer is 'NO'. Definitely, this is not the case with all of the candidates but the majority of them are unaware. In addition to knowledge about the processes, familiarity with the tools like Asana, Jira, Monday.com etc. is also required. Team should be know how to use the tool in order to update user stories/tickets status on the scrum board.
It's a pre-requisite to have appropriate knowledge, understanding of scrum guidelines and tool that has been decided to user and to train the team prior to starting implementation. How can you build a house without a strong foundation? Think about it.
High expectations of the stakeholders; setting the expectations of stakeholders is very important. It has been experienced that once the team decided to start following scrum, stakeholders starting to expect that things will change overnight i-e the team becomes self-organized, no scope changes, sprint goals started to meet, etc. However, one has to realize that this won't be the case when you just started. In order to achieve this state, it may require some time with appropriate coaching/training/mentoring and that varies from team to team.?
User stories are not well groomed; when teams started following scrum they take some time to get better at planning a sprint considering the capacity and the fact that all user stories are meeting the definition of ready. One of the challenges that the team usually faces is tickets are not well groomed. That could be due to the fact that user stories are not well written and requirements are not clear, not spending enough time on refining the requirements during sprint planning (since backlog refinement sessions are not considered a scrum ceremony so this is mostly done during sprint planning). Some teams did refinement sessions separately and some during sprint planning. Another cause is that backlog is not ready for the upcoming sprint in advance so the team didn't get enough time to refine the requirements and have to compromise the time for sprint planning.
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You need to make sure that tickets are well groomed and meet the definition of ready so that it didn't impact the sprint commitments.
Frequent spillovers; when user stories are not well groomed or the team faced issues while completing user stories during the sprint and failed to meet the definition of done then it results in spillovers. This is another commonly faced challenge that is faced by different teams while following scrum. Causes for spillovers could be:
Team members are reluctant to participate; scrum helps you to be transparent by sharing the progress with stakeholders, inspecting by demonstrating and reviewing team progress with stakeholders, and adapting by getting useful feedback during sprint retrospectives. Scrum provides you the opportunity to be courageous, open, respectful, focused, and committed but team members are still reluctant to participate during the scrum ceremonies. It might be due to the fear or the mindset that they will be judged if they share their honest opinion.
You need to give them confidence time and again that their feedback does matter and it will help the team to improve and provide better results.
There might be other challenges for sure but above are some commonly faced challenges that are being experienced/faced by almost all the teams. I might have missed others but feel free to share in the comments.