Nothing will lead one to success quicker than teamwork. When you think about it, the initiation is on the level of an individual, while high efficiency, good communication, and great results are on the level of the team. For that reason, the ways to improve teamwork always remain the focus of great thinkers, and never leave the trend, especially in project management. Especially in those industries that rely heavily on teamwork such as engineering, software development, and project management.
Simultaneous tasks, inter-sectoral inter-dependence, and whatever else not can be very stressful for the group whether they are working on a project or an idea. Project planing tools can help the teams to be more organized. Tremendous workloads make the employees burn quicker especially if they can not rely on the team. Knowing that improvements in teamwork will be greatly appreciated, people kept on developing different frameworks and methodologies that would make their joint work easier and more efficient. However, not all the ideas got much attention as the idea we are about to discuss below.
Now let’s get to the real deal – Scrum, and its role within project management. Firstly, it is important to understand what Scrum is, what it gave to the community, and what made it so popular. Being widely accepted and used by different groups of professionals makes Scrum the number one choice when it comes to project management.
Unlike its precedent Waterfall, it encourages learning through an ongoing experience. Seemingly the most popular frameworks not only help people grow together through tackling complex problems but also reveals certain work principles that can be applied elsewhere and in different life aspects because of their concept.
Perhaps that is the main reason why Scrum is perceived as a methodology rather than a framework. The concept of learning through experience and continuous improvement is now widely accepted because it brings great benefits to the team, enhances their work and efficiency, and most importantly, gets things done quicker!
Scrum is defined as an agile project management methodology that consists of roles, meetings, and tools at the team’s disposal to help them reach the goals within given cycles of work. The word itself is used as a metaphor derived from rugby and refers to higher-level management of complex projects.
In a practical setting, it helps the team break down a very complex problem into smaller segments that are significantly easier to understand and therefore act upon. Any Scrum user witnessed better self-organization while working on some tasks, delivering higher quality work in less time. Agile methodology promotes values and principles that make the work environment flexible enough to favor individuals and interactions over tools and processes and respond to certain changes over a plan to stick with.
Such an approach to project management was recognized by the software development teams and companies since it is all about good collaboration and communication between those who conduct the work and those who need the job done. One of its most essential advantages is related to software agility. Especially with time constraints, software agility is no easy task. What Scrum is focused on is increasing the product’s value while meeting customers’ tiniest needs and desires more frequently. The teams utilizing Scrum deliver the releases more often, which gives a chance to clients to communicate both their needs and desires.
Scrum Team is a group of people dedicated to the work of a project that consists of different inter-dependable tasks. Their goal is to give what is wanted and devote to the serial increments. There are three main roles which are the product owner, the scrum master, and the team of developers. To understand the roles, you can view the product owner as the one who owns ”what” and “why” are wanted, while the scrum master is a type of facilitator of the scrum process as a whole.
The product owner cares about the maximization of both product value and the work done by the developers. The scrum master makes sure that the team thoroughly understands what is there to be done, and how to do it. It’s the role that sets the rules and practices with the goal to serve the product owner. Last but not the least, the team of developers knows ”how” and ”how rapidly” can the job be done.
They are usually the highly skilled side of the whole team dedicated to delivering a releasable increment or possibly final product within the cycle. Broadly speaking, the team of developers is characterized as self-organized and cross-functional. What makes Scrum so popular is how empowering it affects the team. It makes the teams self-organized and cross-functional, allowing them to invest the best of themselves into their work instead of being ordered around from the outside.
Also, the cross-functional characteristic of the team refers to their joint ability to do the work without depending on somebody who is not a part of the team.
Now the key concepts of Scrum spin around sprints and requirements, where the sprints refer to the development cycles that occur until the project is completed or the product is delivered. On the other hand, requirements are what gets built, tested, integrated, and most importantly, ratified inside each of the sprints.
Scrum agile framework is not the most popular just because it’s fun but because it solves problems and meets needs. One does not have to be a genius to understand that breaking down a problem or a task into smaller and easily manageable pieces can be the key to an easy solution.
It offered new dimensions of looking at the complex large-scale project and the means to optimize the benefits of the team. Unlike the competition, Scrum allows the team to get to their goal, which is a final product, quicker by running a series of sprint cycles. Instead of wasting time on extensive planning, this approach encourages each member to optimize the work, constantly communicating with the rest of the team and no one outside. The way Scrum is structured offers plenty of benefits, and there is no doubt why this agile project methodology makes the work agile.
