Why Not Scrum?

Have you ever heard of the term 'Agile' or 'scrum' especially when people talk about projects and products? A quick example will be:

"In our organisation, we want to ensure that we ship products that are great and helpful for our customers and for us to do that, then we need to be AGILE".

So, when you hear that what exactly comes to your mind?

What does Agile mean? Are we really agile or do we like to use the word because it makes us sound cool?

AGILE was developed in 2001 by a group of software developers who wanted better ways to go through the process of software development rather than the traditional way. The traditional method entails that you would need to go through phases of development. These phases include REQUIREMENT, DESIGN, IMPLEMENT, TEST, DEPLOY.

It meant that each step would be completed before you could move to another. This process of design and development is quite rigid because you assume that nothing will change in the product lifecycle but as almost always, requirements change and one may go through various bureaucratic processes just to change a function of a button on a software.

I'm sure by now you are mentally going through the issues that may come up when you use this model to develop and ship products. It may work but it's not efficient. There has to be a better way.

So, our guys who set up AGILE developed what is known as the AGILE manifesto with four values:

• Individuals and interactions?over processes and tools
• Working software?over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration?over contract negotiation
• Responding to change?over following a plan

If you are saying in your mind that

"...but this article is not about agile, so...?"

you'll see why now.

Agile which I opened this article with has some frameworks that easily apply its values and principles to develop products and one of them is SCRUM.

Yeah, SCRUM

Today, there are lots of thoughts on why scrum may not be the perfect framework if you decide to develop the Agile way and I'm here to say:

"Why Not?"

• Do you know how well people will work if they are self-organising? Like, they can express themselves by the quality of their work knowing that there is a clear understanding of the problem to be solved?
• You can ship products incrementally. With this, you don't need to wait for a final product because the product is almost never final and there'll always be new requirements based on needs.
• You can truly listen to your customers and build something they truly need because you know it can be added to the backlog and eventually built. Not just talking to them for the purpose of talking.
• You can focus on one thing per time depending on the complexities

One major challenge organisations face today when they choose to be Agile is that it is bottom-top and not top-bottom.

A classic example is when an organisation chooses to be data-driven thereby using insights from their data to build solutions. While this is not about whether 'data-driven' is the answer to shipping great products or not, they go on to hire some data analysts only to find out that the data is scattered which creates another problem so they decide to keep the data guys to just be doing the bit they can while the business keeps deciding on what they want the 'normal' way.

Also, product owners may not own any product in reality because they do not have the power to actually decide what goes into the product backlog. This could be because there is really no product backlog just team backlogs

So, if you really want to be Agile, then I believe you should open your doors to the possibilities of actually working using the scrum framework rather than the thought of scrum.