The Scrum methodology can help level up your software developers for a more agile process.
Agile businesses are successful businesses. This is especially true in a world that is becoming increasingly competitive across all sectors and markets. But achieving agility is not always easy and must be considered at all levels of your business. However, nowhere is being agile more important than in the realm of software development.
An agile development team not only means that your applications and services will be able to get to market faster, but it also means that these developers will be able to pivot and pivot more quickly in line with market changes and demand.
This is crucial in today's business world. Being able to keep up with the tide of business trends and information can make the difference between success and failure.
But how do you level up your development teams to meet the demands of an agile pipeline? One of the first things you can do is employ scrum.
What is Scrum?
Scrum is an adaptive, flexible, incremental and iterative agile methodology. Scrum breaks projects into smaller parts to make it possible to not only deliver individual features throughout the development lifecycle, but also not be forced to wait until the entire project is completed before it can be debugged. This makes the software lifecycle much more efficient. Additionally, scrum makes it easy to maintain a very high level of observability and transparency so that all stakeholders know the progress of a project.
But most importantly, scrum reinforces the need for open and constant communication with Sprints, Sprint Planning, Sprint Reviews (also known as Stand Up Meetings), Sprint Retrospectives and Daily Scrums. With this in place, all stakeholders will be fully aware of how everything is progressing, what is planned and who is doing what within the scope of the project.
Other than that, why should your company employ scrum for project management? Let's find out.
More responsive development
One of the best things about scrum is that it's about breaking down a large project into smaller, more achievable pieces. By doing this (and being consistent about it), if something happens along the way, the entire project won't suffer.
For example, you may have divided a web application into hundreds of tasks. One of these tasks is to add an animation to a menu. As the team (or developer) works on this task, they may run into problems and their progress slows down. Since you are managing this project with scrum, this issue will not cause bottlenecks in the project as a whole. All other developers can continue as if nothing is wrong.
The team dealing with the problem, however, can just focus on it and resolve it quickly. And because at the heart of scrum is constantly reviewing and adapting progress, your teams won't be stuck on this issue for long.
One of the basic principles of scrum is responding to change rather than following a plan. So maybe the animation you expected doesn't work and the team responsible for the task can adapt quickly and find something better.
Better project control
The level of control you will find with scrum is not what you think. This isn't about middle management attacking developers to make them work faster. Instead, it is about communication on a large scale. Every stakeholder has a voice and knows exactly what is happening at all times.
Because of this, you will find that a project is capable of self-control and self-correction. This is a crucial feature for agile businesses. And with the constant flow of communication required by scum, you'll find there's no need to micromanage your developers. In the end, you will enjoy a very controlled development process without having to impose control.
More accurate project planning and tracking
By definition, scrum lends itself to incredibly precise project planning and tracking. However, you should not confuse this type of planning with creating a comprehensive plan and sticking to it. Scrum is all about adaptability and constant change.
What this means, however, is that (because of the way slag works) you will always know what is going on with every aspect of the project, which makes planning the project easier.
When it comes to tracking the project, just look at the scrum board to see how everything is progressing. It's a quick update on the status of each task.
Stakeholders in Sync
Because scrum puts constant communication at the center, all stakeholders are always in sync with each other. This means you won't have to deal with out-of-the-loop developers, designers, marketing, management, administrators, or operations.
And with the help of the daily Stand Up Meeting, everyone will not only know where the project stands, but will also be able to clearly see where it is going.
Better and evolving prioritization
At the heart of scrum are ever-changing priorities. When something happens that disrupts the process, adjustments can be made very quickly, not only to resolve a problem, but also to reprioritize tasks so that a project doesn't fall behind.
This has the added benefit of helping your company fine-tune a release cycle and know specifically when something will be ready to release. This also means that your projects are more focused on getting things done rather than planning. Your developers will be able to spend more time doing what they do best and less time in a meeting room.
Conclusion
If your company doesn't already use scrum, consider yourself behind the times. To become truly agile, you need tools specifically aimed at empowering every team in your company toward this goal. Scrum should be at the top of your list of tools to use as you continue your digital transformation toward agile dominance.
