What is Scrum: Essence and Pillars

Scrum Pillars

Scrum and other agile practices have been requested for the teams, as they enable short and valuable deliveries and also with constant validation from customers and users. Different from the “heavy” methods or tradicional ones which demand long periods to deliver something to the customer, the agile practices seem to be an excelent choice for inovation, change adaptation in complex environments, development and team integration.

Scrum is NOT:

·        A methodology

·        A tool box where you get only one or two items, some roles or some cerimonies of your interest

·        Only for IT development teams

·        User stories and kanban board originate from Extreme Programming and Kanban Method respectively. They are tools related to transparency and support Scrum practice. However if your thinking about Scrum certification, you should not consider them during your exam application.

Scrum is a framework to develop, deliver and support complex products.

You can find everything that makes it up in Scrum Guide. It is a 19 pages guide, it is short and easy to read and understand its content - https://www.scrumguides.org/

Scrum is also based in 3 pillars:

Transparency: Scrum aims to make the tasks and what needs to be done very clear to the team. It is related to Scrum tools, boards and visible management.

Inspection: every moment in Scrum practice is considered an opportunity to inspect and check the delivery progress in order to identify impediments.

Adaptation: as the team inspects all the time and as such task can be done by anyone, the change adaptation flows in a natural way.

In its essence, Scrum drives us to work in small and self-organizing teams. Those teams are formed from 3 up to 9 people, no more, no less. As it regards a self-organizing team, it should enable different knowledge and background. If we work among only 1 or 2 people we will hardly have several experiences. In case more than 9 people are in the same group, the complexity increases and we will hardly have consensus when making decisions.

I am Gabriela Oliveira, a Project Management specialist and a Scrum enthusiast.

I’d like to help you learning more about agile practices and Project Management world.

In several short articles we will find out together what is Scrum and how working with it.

Besides, my purpose is sharing knowledge about other Project management practices, their application in real companies and also how using them in your personal projects.

Please coment which other practices and methodologies you would like to learn more about.