Despite the myths you might have heard about Scrum, it’s not a revolutionary, cutting-edge project management tool that’s here to change how your team works forever.
It’s been around since 1993. We don’t mean to make you feel old, but that’s almost 30 years ago. And, while it’s gone through many updates, the main principles haven’t changed much over the years.
But even in 2021, it’s still very different from the “traditional” project management approach. Though it’s not a ubiquitous choice that always works better, Scrum is a superior option for some projects.
But without understanding the Scrum framework, you can’t know whether it’s right for your project.
On that note, let’s do a deep-dive into what Scrum is, who should use it, when it’s beneficial, and how you can apply it within your team or company.
What is Scrum?
Scrum is a framework within the Agile methodology where a small, cross-functional team works on delivering product increments in short “sprints”.
A sprint is a time-boxed period, typically lasting a few weeks, where your project team focuses solely on the increment.
It outlines a lot of specific deliverables — or artifacts — and meetings and processes — or ceremonies — to help you efficiently organize your projects.
This is what the Scrum workflow looks like:
Let’s start by taking a closer look at the Scrum values.
Get started with staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud
What are the values of Scrum?
The 5 core Scrum values are commitment, courage, focus, openness, and respect.
- Commitment: everyone on the Scrum team must commit to achieving the sprint goal.
- Courage: don’t buckle under pressure from hierarchical management. Have the courage to ask tough questions and make sure all team and stakeholder voices are heard.
- Focus: during a sprint, everyone must dedicate all their energy to it.
- Openness: make openly sharing potential issues and mistakes part of the culture.
- Respect: respect everyone’s abilities and give them a platform to share their unique insights.
Without internalizing these values, a self-organizing team will struggle to deliver results. The right mix of self-startership, focus, and empathy is vital. A Scrum team will stagnate without it.
Don’t just read the Scrum values and think that’s it. They must become second-nature to your team. It might be helpful if an experienced Scrum Master can lead by example in the beginning.Who’s part of a Scrum team?
A Scrum team that follows the official Scrum Guide to the letter includes these 3 main Scrum roles:
- Development team members — referred to as developers in the 2020 Guide — are the Scrum team members who work on the product increment. They’re also responsible for choosing their own tasks, managing, and reviewing their work.
- The product owner is the person responsible for the product vision, overall roadmap, and collaboration with stakeholders.
- The Scrum Master owns the Scrum process and helps every team member work efficiently within the new format. For teams with only experienced members, you may not need a Scrum Master.
A stakeholder is someone with a direct stake in the outcome of a project. Think executive, VIP client, business analyst, project sponsor, or a product manager. While they’re not officially part of the Scrum team, they’re crucial to the process.
Scrum without stakeholder involvement is like a Snickers bar without peanuts — a different thing entirely. I’m looking at you, Mars Bar.
How long does a Scrum sprint last?
According to the Status Quo Agile 2020 survey, the majority of Scrum sprints last 2 weeks.
While sprints lasting 3–4 weeks make up a 3rd of the total, virtually no respondents go past a month.
That’s because the official Scrum Guide defines a sprint as an event of a fixed length of 1 month or less.
What are the Scrum ceremonies (meetings)?
There are several mandatory ceremonies in the Scrum framework, including the daily Scrum and sprint planning meeting.
- Product backlog refinement: a meeting where you refine and prioritize the items in your product backlog. It lays the foundation for planning the next sprint.
- Sprint planning: a meeting where you pick items from the product backlog and create a dedicated sprint backlog. You may also set a sprint goal, specifying which items are absolute musts.
- Daily Scrum: a daily meeting — typically held in the morning with everyone standing — where you discuss progress, roadblocks, and tasks. You only hold these meetings during a sprint.
- Sprint review: a meeting with stakeholders and customers where you test the new increment. If it’s accepted, you can remove the features from the backlog. If not, it’s back to the drawing board.
- Sprint retrospective: a meeting where you focus on learning from the sprint. The goal is to figure out what you did right, what went wrong, and how you can improve.
If you have any skeptics on your team, stick to calling them meetings. It reduces the “woo factor” and helps people understand how practical Scrum is.
We explain Scrum meetings in more detail in our dedicated post.
What are the Scrum artifacts?
The Scrum artifacts — or deliverables — your team produces during the process include the product backlog, sprint goal, and increment.
- Product backlog: a list of user stories — features from the user’s point of view — that you need to deliver the final product.
- Sprint backlog: a refined list of items selected from the main product backlog to tackle in the sprint.
- Sprint goal: the sprint backlog, along with the overall reason for choosing those features.
- Product increment: the resulting iteration delivered at the end of each sprint.
When to use Scrum and when to avoid it
Now that you have a basic understanding of Scrum, let’s figure out if it’s the right option for your projects.
Where is Scrum used? Most common use cases
According to a 2020 Koblenz University study, Agile is still most prominent in software and IT. But other departments are also starting to take notice.
The same study also showed that 84% of Agile teams use Scrum, so the numbers also reflect Scrum usage.
While software and IT make up the majority, these departments no longer have a monopoly. Marketing, design, and even physical product teams have started to adopt the Agile framework.
So just going by department or company industry isn’t enough. Let’s examine Scrum’s unique benefits, and how they line up with your priorities.
When you should use Scrum: primary factors and benefits
According to the 2020 State of Agile survey, the top 5 reasons for going Agile are to:
- Accelerate software delivery
- Enhance the ability to manage changing priorities
- Increase productivity
- Improve business/IT alignment
- Enhance software quality
These are also the reasons behind our own internal Scrum teams, like our fully remote R&D team.
And they’re convincing arguments for a lot of project teams. Especially if your company has:
- Highly unpredictable projects
- A rapidly changing marketplace
- Little need for standardization or perfect processes
- A disconnect between business people and makers
If you want more speed and productivity, better business/maker alignment, and have unpredictable one-off projects, Scrum is a good idea.
But Scrum project management isn’t a catch-all approach for all teams and projects.
When you should avoid Scrum
For some companies, teams, departments, and projects, Scrum is a bad fit. Especially when you need:
- Standardized, repeatable projects or processes
- A strict schedule to execute the project successfully
- To focus on continuous improvement and lowering running costs
If you need to set aside resources and reserve expensive equipment up-front, a more predictable approach works better.
If your company relies on improving processes bit-by-bit rather than big projects, Kanban may be a better fit.
How to create the perfect environment for Scrum with staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud
When switching to a new framework, you need to recruit your whole organization. If it’s your first foray into Agile project management, then even more so.
The best way to facilitate organization-wide change is to tackle it from the ground up. With staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, you can create the perfect platform for implementing Scrum at your company.
With automations, unique extensibility, and 40+ integrations, we help teams transform how they work.
Collaborate on a shared product backlog directly with shareholders.
You can use our ready-made template to create an organized product backlog in minutes. Just start filling it out with upcoming user stories.
With guest accounts and user permission control, you can easily share it with all relevant stakeholders. VIP clients and executives can have editor access, while others can only view it.
That sets the stage for a new approach where stakeholders are more involved. Stakeholders can review every new product backlog item in real-time and contribute their own.
Plan and manage each sprint easily using customized templates.
You can also use our Scrum board template to manage progress during each sprint. With visual assignees and color-coded statuses, everyone’s daily tasks are 100% clear.
You can also easily customize and re-use new templates that suit your workflow. Nothing fits better than custom-made, after all.
Take advantage of the sprint view app and burndown charts.
With a robust Apps Framework, users can easily create the functionality they need. Combine that with our active community, and you get a wide variety of apps available for free.
A good example of this is the sprint view app, created by a staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud user to implement Scrum. The primary view is a color-coded sprint backlog board.
And it includes a burndown chart view to help you measure and stay on top of your progress. It can help you identify bottlenecks or problems.
If this doesn’t match your workflow, you can use our Apps Framework to create custom views from scratch.
Avoid silos between teams with integrations and automate menial tasks.
Information silos exist in almost every company. With dozens or even 100s of apps in use across teams, it’s hard to avoid it.
That’s where we come in. You can use our robust integrations to start to centralize your data.
If your development team works with Jira, you can create and sync items based on Jira issues. And that’s only a single application.
You can repeat this step for every platform that any team or department uses.
You can also automate menial tasks — like Slack or email reminders — and make sure the next person knows as soon as a task status changes.
That makes the workflow a lot smoother. There’s no human-caused time lag from one stage to the next.
Implement Scrum as part of your overall project management strategy
Sure, Scrum isn’t perfect, and it’s not the right choice for every project.
But in some cases, it’s unbeatable. If you work in a fast-moving industry, you can’t afford to let a lengthy planning process slow down progress.
Scrum can help your team avoid bottlenecks, focus on getting work done faster, and stay in tune with the market.
Try out our Scrum sprint template and start planning your first sprint today.
Get started