Implementation of Scrum in an existing company or start-up
When we advise on a greenfield investment, project or company, we are in both the easiest and the most difficult situation.
A start-up company's primary goal is to grow fast, with sustainable operations taking a back seat, while a traditional company usually has its priorities reversed.
Whatever the case, it is important to be able to react quickly to the needs of our customers, clients or even external market factors. This is where the scrum framework helps.
Scrum is a framework that is mostly used in software development.
However, there are certain elements that are useful to implement in other projects or even at company level. In the following, we put together our suggestions to make it easier to implement a more structured agile operation.
1. Is agile the right way to operate?
Scrum is not a panacea, it is the preferred method in most software development projects today, but in some project situations it is explicitly less useful or not useful at all.
Before we introduce it, let's read through: agilis means our article, then we will consider:
- How predictable is the work?
- How many people are working on the project?
- How do our processes relate to the outputs?
- At what intervals should information be synchronised between employees?
- Do we have cross-functional people?
- Do we need frequent feedback in our processes?
- Methodological SWOT analysis.
These issues may be accompanied by other factors, e.g. external dependencies, legal compliance, specific project characteristics.
We recommend engaging the right Agile coach at the mapping stage, relatively quickly to see if Agile is the most fit for purpose.
2. Planning the introduction
Just as in life there is a difference between answering a question and reacting to it:
Being agile means reacting quickly to changes in a planned way, rather than throwing everything away immediately.
The former is a conscious, well thought-out, well-founded plan that we act on. The latter is a reflexive, impulsive, sometimes possibly correct, but overwhelmingly unthought-out action. We weigh our options.
Similarly, as when designing our iterations, let's plan which elements of the agile framework fit into our operating model. Scrum provides few rules, but it is strict in those rules, let's decide how we can best tailor its elements to our company.
If we can, we can pilot our plan on a smaller scale and then implement changes using the outputs of the first retrospectives.
3. Vision and milestones
We know where we are heading. It is important to know what we are doing and why. While it makes sense to find the answer to the why question when developing the vision, when planning the milestones we break down the how and what questions into details.
From vision to milestones? User Story Mapping.
We almost always plan the work ahead from the top down, milestones are also often used in software development, but they are also useful for a broader scope.
If designed correctly, our work can be tracked on the vision scale, which gives management an important picture of leadership.
Let the milestones be:
- Developed by
- Make them responsible
- Define the deadlines
4. Responsible person
Let's not expect our people to learn the new framework on their own. One of the mandatory roles is scrum master.
We shouldn't necessarily be intimidated by interviewing for a new position either, as Scrum Master is a role that can be filled by an existing colleague.
The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring that employees adhere to the elements of the Scrum framework, keeping them on the path of continuous improvement, and overlaps with the Agile Coach, who teaches employees the basic Agile guidelines.
As we always say, Scrum is a simple framework, but it can lead to terribly complex and multifaceted implementations.
To implement it correctly, you need an experienced professional.
5. Continuous follow-up
One of the keys to continuous improvement is frequantified feedback. This is a key advantage of Scrum, which enables us to adapt quickly to different situations.
It's time for Retro.
At any time you can retrospect a specific event or time interval, for the correct output we recommend you always keep in mind the Retrospective guidelines.
Avoid the common mistakes of retrospectives, don't abandon them or try to change everything.
It is sometimes a difficult decision to implement a new framework, but like almost everything in life, it will become easier to make decisions over time, because Scrum implementation is also learn-by-doing based, and you can only avoid certain mistakes once you have made them.
Apart from this, when workflows make it available, we can only recommend the correct use of Scrum.