In that spirit, here are six ways to develop your hybrid approach to project management. Does the Scrum Master Role Have to Evolve? By Andy Jordan September 2, 2020. Scrum masters are critical to the. Scrum project management is an agile approach often used with software evaluation and selection projects that incorporates interactive practices and small wins to reach the end goal. It uses a set of resources, meetings, and roles that help teams manage and plan their work. Traditional project management emphasizes on conducting detailed upfront planning for the project with higher priority for fixing the scope, cost and schedule - and managing those parameters. Over the past few years, Scrum has become the default face of agile project management.One of the most popular agile frameworks, Scrum is widely adopted by software and non-software development teams alike.

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• Scrum Project Management Methodology
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• Scrum Project Management Methodology

The Agile movement is an approach to software development described in the Agile Manifesto. The Agile Manifesto describes the Agile philosophy using four foundational values:

• individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• working software over comprehensive documentation
• customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• responding to change over following a plan

The Agile Manifesto provides guidance rather than a prescriptive methodology on what and how to be Agile. The values and principles found in the Agile Manifesto are meant to be adapted to best fit a particular situation. For that reason, a variety of methods have been developed to implement the Agile movement. One of the most popular methods is Scrum. According to a 2015 State of Scrum Survey Report, released by ScrumAlliance, Scrum is widely used and will continue to be used across a variety of functional business areas to deliver successful projects. This article discusses the Scrum methodology, the history of Scrum, how it can benefit your organization, limitations you may encounter and how to make the Scrum structure work for your organization.

What is Scrum?

Any discussion of efficient scrum project management must begin with a definition of scrum.

“Scrum is a management framework for incremental product development using one or more cross-functional, self-organizing teams of about seven people each.”

“It provides a structure of roles, meetings, rules, and artifacts. Teams are responsible for creating and adapting their processes within this framework.”

“Scrum uses fixed-length iterations, called Sprints, which are typically 1-2 weeks long (never more than 30 days). Scrum teams attempt to build a potentially shippable (properly tested) product increment every iteration.”

Let’s unpack those statements to gain a deeper understanding of the scrum methodology, frameworks, and processes.

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What the Scrum Process is Not

Scrum is not a linear development method; that’s the waterfall model. Waterfall is defined by a series of linear events in which the product is planned, developed, tested, etc., with no step started until the preceding step is complete. Scrum aims to develop smaller pieces of a release faster rather than focusing on all the steps taking place within those smaller iterations, or sprints.

Why Use the Scrum Methodology?

There are four primary benefits that come with using the Scrum method of Agile development:

1. Responsiveness to Customers—Software development organizations are all too familiar with the customer demand to “build it yesterday.” In a traditional, waterfall development organization, you may be building a significant feature or function into a twice-a-year release schedule, and may be losing customers in the process. If the customers aren’t lost, they may be unhappy anyway and lost eventually when they encounter a competitor who can deliver more responsively. When working in short and frequent development cycles, you can deliver products to your customers almost on-demand, and can adapt more quickly to new demands.
2. Lower Cost of Development—Agile, and Scrum, have proven to be less wasteful and more cost-effective. Developers wear many hats, and can be more versatile because smaller units can be effectively tested by the people who built them. Specialized roles are eliminated or reduced, ultimately creating a cost savings.
3. Job Satisfaction—By delivering products rapidly, the team receives that extra jolt of satisfaction when a product is done and goes out the door. Every development team knows how good it feels to release a product twice a year, but with Scrum the team can feel that same satisfaction by releasing a product twelve times a year.
4. More Immediate Returns—Instead of getting rewarded by customers twice a year, the reward is much more frequent. In addition, instead of delivering a new feature that will bring in the new customers twice a year, features can be delivered more frequently and special requests can be worked into the accelerated delivery schedule and get out the door fast.

A Brief History of Scrum

After publication of Dr. Winston Royce’s paper in 1970, titled “Managing the Development of Large Software Systems,” many people began looking for a new approach to software development that would eliminate the weaknesses of the criticized waterfall methodology. The name ‘Scrum’ came from Takeuchi’s and Nonaka’s 1986 paper, “The New New Product Development Game.” This paper suggested that the best way to achieve a goal is to provide clear objectives to a small team. In 1995, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber codified Scrum in their paper titled “SCRUM Software Development Process.”

How the Scrum Structure Works

The Scrum project management framework relies on self-organizing teams whose goal is to deliver complete products after fixed iterations, or sprints. In order to succeed using Scrum, it is useful to follow the Scrum structure. This structure consists of roles, meetings, rules, and artifacts.

Scrum Roles
Scrum consists of three roles:

• Product Owner—The Product Owner is the champion who has a thorough understanding of the product’s business value. They communicate the customer/stakeholder needs to the development team, but they are not responsible for the technical side of development. The Product Owner also writes the user stories and prioritizes them.
• Development Team—The development team performs all of the technical development tasks. The team is cross-functional and responsible for the analysis, design, writing of code, testing, technical communication, etc., based on the user stories and user story priority.
• Scrum Master—The Scrum Master facilitates the work of the Scrum team. The Scrum Master works with the Product Owner and the development team to remove obstacles and to prevent distractions. All communication to the development team by non-team members is filtered through the Scrum Master. (Sometimes Scrum teams meet in a “Scrum of Scrums,” which usually consists of the Scrum Masters from each team.)

Scrum Meetings
There are four types of Scrum meetings:

• Sprint Planning—The Sprint Planning meeting is attended by everyone on the Scrum team. The Product is presented at this meeting and everyone’s concerns and interests should be voiced here. This is where priorities are presented and time estimates are made.
• Daily Scrum Meeting—A Scrum meeting that takes place daily during a sprint. They are brief and are intended to plan the development team’s activity for the day. This is the place for discussing obstacles encountered or confusion over a user story. The meeting is presided over by the Scrum Master and attended by the development team.
• Sprint Review—The Sprint Review is a demonstration of the working product developed during the sprint. This meeting occurs at the end of the sprint and is primarily used to provide stakeholders a detailed look at what was accomplished.
• Sprint Retrospective—The Sprint Retrospective is a post-mortem to discuss how the team did during the sprint and how it can improve its performance in the future.

In addition to these four meeting types, teams sometimes take time out during a sprint to hold a backlog refinement meeting to discuss backlog items and prepare for the next sprint. This can include conversations about prioritizing items in the Product Backlog and refining backlog items into smaller chunks.

Artifacts
Scrum artifacts represent the work that goes into completing a particular project or sprint and provide transparency into project details. Sims 4 build on any lot cheat. There are three major artifacts that require management throughout a Scrum project: the product backlog, sprint backlog, and burndown charts. These are essential to delivering value-filled software to your customers.

Sprint artifacts and their components include:

• Product Backlog—Everything, both technical and user-centric, that must be completed within a project.
• Sprint Backlog—The set of all tasks to be completed within a sprint iteration. These are taken from the Product Backlog during the Sprint Planning Meeting.
• Product Backlog Item—An item from the Product Backlog that is to be completed within a sprint iteration. It is usually broken down into a few smaller tasks.
• Sprint Task—What you do to deliver a Product Backlog Item.
• Sprint Burndown Chart—The remaining effort required to complete the sprint tasks. The burndown chart can go up or down in response to discoveries the team makes about completing a task. This is not intended to be a report on team progress, but a way to determine how to overcome obstacles and meet commitments.
• Product Release/Burndown Chart—This is updated by the Scrum Master at the end of each sprint. The horizontal axis of the chart shows the sprints and the vertical axis shows the amount of work remaining at the start of each sprint.

Scrum Methodology Rules
For the most part, the Roles, Meetings, and Artifacts are the rules of Scrum, but some other rules may be applied in order to make Scrum work efficiently:

• The Scrum Team consists of the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development team and no one else
• Sprints should all be the same length
• When one sprint ends, the next sprint begins
• Every sprint begins with a Sprint Planning Meeting - the Scrum Master and Development team meet every morning for the daily meeting
• Every sprint has a Sprint Review Meeting to give stakeholders a chance to provide feedback
• It is not good practice to add to the sprint backlog during a sprint

For more information on Scrum terminology, refer to a glossary of Scrum terminology.

Limitations of the Scrum Framework

Scrum was developed to enable highly collaborative work. As a consequence, environments that impede collaboration are not ideal for the Scrum method. For example, if teams are located all over the world, the daily meeting may not be realistic for some team members. When a vital element of Scrum, such as the daily meeting, becomes an annoyance rather than a facilitator, that’s a sign that Scrum may not be successful.

Another limitation is that the team must be versatile and nimble. Ideally, any development team member can step into any other team member’s shoes to fulfill a task. This is another reason having all team members collaborate at the daily meeting will lead to success.

Scrum Project Management

The Right Agile Methodology for You

As with any business decision, it’s a good idea to examine all Agile methodologies before settling on the one that is best suited for your organization. For example, you may find that eXtreme Programming (XP) is more suitable for your needs. XP is similar to Scrum, but the sprints are shorter, it allows changes to the sprint backlog during the sprint and XP priorities are set by the customer. Then again, Scrumban may be more suitable for you. Scrumban allows adding new backlog items to the sprint and also does not require time estimation in the planning phase. In other words, there are a variety of methodologies and that variety allows you to find the optimal way to make your customers happy.

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What is Scrum?

In the agile Scrum world, instead of providing complete, detailed descriptions of how everything is to be done on a project, much of it is left up to the Scrum software development team. This is because the team will know best how to solve the problem they are presented.

This is why in Scrum development, for example, a sprint planning meeting is described in terms of the desired outcome (a commitment to a set of features to be developed in the next sprint) instead of a set of Entry criteria, Task definitions, Validation criteria, Exit criteria (ETVX) and so on, as would be provided in most methodologies.

Scrum relies on a self-organizing, cross-functional team. The scrum team is self-organizing in that there is no overall team leader who decides which person will do which task or how a problem will be solved. Those are issues that are decided by the team as a whole.

And in Scrum, a team is cross functional, meaning everyone is needed to take a feature from idea to implementation.

Scrum Project Management Methodology

Within agile development, Scrum teams are supported by two specific roles. The first is a ScrumMaster, who can be thought of as a coach for the team, helping team members use the Scrum process to perform at the highest level.

The product owner (PO) is the other role, and in Scrum software development, represents the business, customers or users, and guides the team toward building the right product.

Scrum Development: What’s Involved?

The Scrum model suggests that projects progress via a series of sprints. In keeping with an agile methodology, sprints are timeboxed to no more than a month long, most commonly two weeks.

Scrum methodology advocates for a planning meeting at the start of the sprint, where team members figure out how many items they can commit to, and then create a sprint backlog – a list of the tasks to perform during the sprint.

During an agile Scrum sprint, the Scrum team takes a small set of features from idea to coded and tested functionality. At the end, these features are done, meaning coded, tested and integrated into the evolving product or system.

On each day of the sprint, all team members should attend a daily Scrum meeting, including the ScrumMaster and the product owner. This meeting is timeboxed to no more than 15 minutes. During that time, team members share what they worked on the prior day, will work on that day, and identify any impediments to progress.

The Scrum model sees daily scrums as a way to synchronize the work of team members as they discuss the work of the sprint.

At the end of a sprint, the team conducts a sprint review during which the team demonstrates the new functionality to the PO or any other stakeholder who wishes to provide feedback that could influence the next sprint.

This feedback loop within Scrum software development may result in changes to the freshly delivered functionality, but it may just as likely result in revising or adding items to the product backlog.

Another activity in Scrum project management is the sprint retrospective at the end of each sprint. The whole team participates in this meeting, including the ScrumMaster and PO. The meeting is an opportunity to reflect on the sprint that has ended, and identify opportunities to improve.

Scrum Process: The Main Artifacts

The primary artifact in Scrum development is, of course, the product itself. The Scrum model expects the team to bring the product or system to a potentially shippable state at the end of each Scrum sprint.

The product backlog is another artifact of Scrum. This is the complete list of the functionality that remains to be added to the product. The product owner prioritizes the backlog so the team always works on the most valuable features first.

The most popular and successful way to create a product backlog using Scrum methodology is to populate it with user stories, which are short descriptions of functionality described from the perspective of a user or customer.

In Scrum project management, on the first day of a sprint and during the planning meeting, team members create the sprint backlog. The sprint backlog can be thought of as the team's to-do list for the sprint, whereas a product backlog is a list of features to be built (written in the form of user stories).

The sprint backlog is the list of tasks the team needs to perform in order to deliver the functionality it committed to deliver during the sprint.

Additional artifacts resulting from the Scrum agile methodology is the sprint burndown chart and release burndown chart. Burndown charts show the amount of work remaining either in a sprint or a release, and are an effective tool in Scrum software development to determine whether a sprint or release is on schedule to have all planned work finished by the desired date.

The Agile Scrum Project: Main Roles

Even if you are new to Scrum, you may have heard of a role called the ScrumMaster. The ScrumMaster is the team's coach, and helps Scrum practitioners achieve their highest level of performance.

In the Scrum process, a ScrumMaster differs from a traditional project manager in many ways, including that this role does not provide day-to-day direction to the team and does not assign tasks to individuals.

A good ScrumMaster shelters the team from outside distractions, allowing team members to focus maniacally during the sprint on the goal they have selected.

While the ScrumMaster focuses on helping the team be the best that it can be, the product owner works to direct the team to the right goal. The product owner does this by creating a compelling vision of the product, and then conveying that vision to the team through the product backlog.

The product owner is responsible for prioritizing the backlog during Scrum development, to ensure it’s up to par as more is learned about the system being built, its users, the team and so on.

The third and final role in Scrum project management is the Scrum team itself. Although individuals may join the team with various job titles, in Scrum, those titles are insignificant. Scrum methodology states that each person contributes in whatever way they can to complete the work of each sprint.

This does not mean that a tester will be expected to re-architect the system; individuals will spend most (and sometimes all) of their time working in whatever discipline they worked before adopting the agile Scrum model. But with Scrum, individuals are expected to work beyond their preferred disciplines whenever doing so would be for the good of the team.

One way to think of the interlocking nature of these three roles in this agile methodology is as a racecar.

The Scrum team is the car itself, ready to speed along in whatever direction it is pointed. The product owner is the driver, making sure that the car is always going in the right direction. And the ScrumMaster is the chief mechanic, keeping the car well tuned and performing at its best.

Recommended Resources Related To Scrum

• Introduction to Scrum PPT
  

Courses Related To Scrum

Scrum Foundations Video Series

Project Management Scrum Methodology

All the foundational knowledge of Scrum including: the framework, values, different roles, meetings, backlogs, and improving efficiency & quality.

Learn More About Scrum

Check out the additional chapters below to learn more about Scrum

Scrum Project Management Methodology