Show your Business Acumen with Scrum
April 23, 2008
I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately into how our development team can have an impact on the business. It’s basic common sense when you think it through. We need customer requirements in and quality software out and need to do these as soon as possible for the customer. In the book I just read, it talked about inventory a lot. In software, our inventory is our “work in progress.” It’s sitting on the shelf (in our brains, in a design doc, or in source control) just praying to be finished and then hoping someday it makes it out the door. In our old waterfall days sometimes that took over a year or more to accomplish.
With Scrum, we’re able to keep the work in progress to a minimum, in fact, it’s one of our primary goals. This leads to getting more done and having more to show to show, of value to the product owner, at the end of the sprint. It gives the product owner many chances over the course of the year to decide to ship. On the team I work on right now, we’re about to ship our third release in the last 8 months. Real value, in the customer hands and much closer to when the customer asked for the functionality. This not only is keeping our inventory down, but it’s creating a real relationship with the customer base (field, product management) and a comfort/loyalty in that we can be responsive to the needs of the customer and the business.
I think of each completed user story or epic as another potential business problem solved. Another sale potential that we didn’t have just a sprint ago.
Another big part of the business is making sure you have the right people working on the right things. In Scrum, your teams are always focused on the next top priority item for the business. No more do we throw a list of 100 items and start them all in parallel and come back to the table to see it 10 months later. Hope it all works together as we cross our fingers and do the integration dance.
In an agile team, it builds every day, it demos every 30 days or less, and it’s always ready to ship.
If there are any readers out there, be interested in hearing how you feel Scrum is helping your business plan.
-Corey
One Response to “Show your Business Acumen with Scrum”
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April 24, 2008 at 9:54 am
Lots of people are replying to me in Facebook instead of here, so I thought I would answer the questions here as well:
1. The book is called “What the CEO Wants You To Know” by Ram Charan by the way
2. A reader asked about creating effective teams so that stakeholders aren’t sitting in reviews listening to developers talking to developers about framework tasks. I went into that a little in my previous post on thin slicing, but for it to work appropriately you need to set up the teams with the right people to be able to execute on those stories. I sense a new post coming. Stay tuned.