What is Agile Scrum?

When I tell people that I am a certified Scrum Master, I usually get a confused look followed by "a what master?". I always find this so funny but also want people to understand what it is. Scrum was founded in 1993 by Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales and Jeff McKenna. Making it only 27 years old, one year older than me (at the time of writing), so it's still relatively young. No surprise people don't know much about it. The founders of Scrum are thought to have been inspired by Takeuchi and Nonaka. Who in 1986 released a paper comparing high functioning and cross-functional product development teams to rugby teams using the scrum formation when they restart play. It is often used in the tech world but I believe many industries could benefit from some of the principles and it can even help get organised in your own personal life. So I hope to shed some light on what it is here.

Scrum is an agile delivery framework that teams use to develop, deliver and sustain complex products. It aims to help implement agile principles by changing the way people work. In the 2020 Scrum guide, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland define Scrum as:

'A lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organisations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems.'

The more traditional project development model is known as 'waterfall' where projects are completed sequentially. Scrum products are released incrementally in a series of iterations called sprints. These sprints can be anything from one to four weeks long. Within the sprints, the new feature is developed, tested, reviewed and presented to stakeholders. This allows continuous improvement as feedback is given and necessary adaptations can be made early. In layman's terms, imagine you are creating a new pizza the waterfall model would have you create the whole pizza then present it to the stakeholders at the end. This would be their first time seeing and tasting it and they could end up not liking it. With scrum, you present each part of the pizza to the stakeholders as soon as it's ready, once you have made the dough they can taste it, review it and give feedback straight away, and the same goes for the sauce, the toppings, the cheese and so on. By the time the whole pizza is ready, they would have had a taste of all the different components and should be happy with the end result. Sprints are broken down into four events that form the inspective and adaptive nature of Scrum they are; sprint planning, daily stand-ups, sprint retrospective and sprint reviews.

These events are formulated to implement these three Scrum pillars:

• Transparency - ongoing work must be visible to everyone on the team

• Inspection - the team must constantly inspect work and the progress toward an agreed goal to ensure it's heading in the right direction and also enable adaptation

• Adaptation - adjust products or features that deviate from the acceptable limit as soon as possible

The Scrum team (made up of a Scrum Master, a Product Owner and Developers) is expected to adequately implement these three pillars by encouraging the team to live out these five values: Commitment, Courage, Focus, Openness and Respect.

Scrum was originally formalised for software development projects, but it works well for any complex, innovative scope of work. I look forward to seeing Scrum being used to improve teamwork in different industries as more and more people find out about it. It can even be used in your daily life. Frank de Wit, did a Ted Talk about how he uses Scrum at home to empower his children.

How does Scrum empower? A Scrum Team has to have the following two characteristics:

1. Self-organised - teams that organise their work and process flow deciding who does what, when and how. Highly involved management is not encouraged, even the Scrum Master is meant to be a servant leader to the team. They are there to guide them and remove impediments. Employing more of a leader-leader leadership model rather than a leader-follower leadership model.

2. Cross-functional - this means the team should possess all the skills required to complete a sprint without needing external help.

Scrum is a framework that helps teams work together. Much like a rugby team (where it gets its name) Scrum encourages teams to learn through experiences, being self-organised and reflecting on their work to improve continuously. The three pillars aim to change the way a team works, but the success of a team is down to their ability to embody the values to change the way they think to change the way they do. What I love about Scrum; it is not just about bringing business value but also employee value.