You might be thinking my title would get a Homer Simpson answer (Doh!), but too many teams try to do Scrum or Agile in a rigid, prescriptive way. There are a couple of main reasons why I see this. The first is the desire of new teams to “do” Scrum correctly when they are new to Scrum. I look like that feeling! In my first Scrum project (several years ago) I defended the process against change instead of being open to process change. Oh well, we all have to learn somehow!
Change for change is not good. Any process change should be driven by retrospective discussions and a desire to reduce or remove impediments. What is holding your team and product back? What was the root cause of the problems you encountered? The team should discuss these problems and choose one or two of the main ones and agree to work on them and try to find solutions for them. If that means changing Scrum, CHANGE SCRUM!
The other main cause I see for process rigidity is in teams and projects that are large and complex enough to require an electronic system to track work items, making distributed team communication easy to find and use and report on. about status and progress. There are many tools available and any tool, used to drive the team and the project, can take the agility out of your organization. However, almost every team has some distributed component and we all know that the last simple project was done in 1959. This means that almost every team and project needs a system to help manage the project.
I’m a super agile sticky white board guy. Give me a team room with white boards and lots of multi-colored stickers and I’ll be a happy camper! Why? Because I know the whiteboard and sticky notes are NOT the project, the people and the conversations they have with each other are the project and the whiteboards and sticky notes are used to fuel those conversations and track work.
However, for most teams and most organizations, the agile project of my dreams simply doesn’t exist and trying to force it is foolish. Most organizations are going to need a tool.
What makes a good Scrum/Agile tool?
1) You should not have a fixed process flow. The team must be able to adjust the process to fit their culture and organization.
2) It should be simple enough to allow it to stay out of the way. The team should drive the project rather than the tool.
3) You must produce status and progress reports that are customizable and accessible to the business. Feedback is the process that keeps Scrum/Agile in
track in a world of shifting priorities. Having status and progress reports that truly inform project stakeholders and sponsors of where the project stands drives the prioritization process to meet business needs.
4) The process must have a business value-driven approach. In other words, the project management tool must drive business value and make the delivery of business value clear to the team and stakeholders. If a tool is a bottom-up project management tool, the team is building the trees at such a high rate that the forest of business value is totally obscured.
How the team uses the tool and how the tool allows the team to focus on delivering business value is the top critical issue. A tool must be flexible.
This week Daptiv released Daptiv Scrum which can be used in conjunction with its popular Daptiv PPM product. These tools allow companies to manage and track all of their work in one visible source centrally. This allows the company to see the benefits of an agile process. After setting up the system to match the process in the organization, the team and management can take comfort in knowing that the team is driving the product rather than the tool. Along with the standard Scrum roles of Product Owner and Scrum Master, you can create custom roles to meet your need for engineering leadership, release management, configuration management, and other custom roles.
One of the biggest benefits of Daptiv Scrum is the ability to easily manage a story-based backlog of products. Priority changes are made by dragging and dropping directly into the product backlog.
Daptiv Scrum also gives you the reporting artifacts you need to manage the Scrum process: Sprint Burndown, Release Burndown, Sprint Summary including Calculated Velocity, Sprint Tracking, and Features by Product Category. They’re all here.
However, one of the best advantages is the ease of installation and maintenance. Based on a web model, Daptiv offers automatic updates via the web, freeing your team from updates and configuration hassles. This ISO 27001-certified organization provides your team with the security, redundancy, uptime, maintenance, and new features so your organization can focus on delivering business value.
To learn more about Daptiv Scrum, check out their website. See the press release at http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Daptiv-Inc-1001235.html.