Scrum: Achieving more with less

These days we found ourselves facing more and more complex and uncertain projects. How we deliver the results within tight budgets and short timeframe is always a challenge. I keep hearing the term - Scrum over and over again, but did not pay much attention to it until I  witnessed how it makes “impossible things” happen.

The first time when I heard about Scrum was from my previous VP of Marketing, David Armstrong at Ricoh, who mentioned the Pig and Chicken cartoon at a team building event. According to Jeff Sutherland, the “pigs” are the ones who are totally committed to the project and are responsible for its outcome. The “chickens” are the people who are informed of its progress: the stakeholders.

Source: agilesafari.com

It was interesting but I did not realize the value of Scrum at that time. Four years later, the Scrum methodology really impressed me when I saw the team at Sigma Software complete a major project in 6 months with less than 8 people. They were able to build an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) of the predictive analytic model for a major local telecom operator. The model was marked as the best performing model by the operator during the PoC stage.

I was further thrilled at the International Project Management Day 2016 when Joe Justice had a keynote describing how Wikispeed involves a team of volunteers from across the globe to utilize the Scrum methodology, achieving extraordinary results in designing a high efficiency and high performance automobile.

Image: Joe Justice built a 100mpg car using Scrum methodology

Gone are the times of a big team, tedious and long meetings, delays, and over budget projects.

Image: Interesting facts - WhatsApp vs. Vodafone Group

Although Scrum has been widely used in software development, its philosophy of delivering a complete feature at a time is valuable to business people and entrepreneurs. For example, if you open a bakery, it’s more desirable to sell a cupcake as a start than a big cake without filling and icing. A cupcake is a viable product that can grow into a cake or a wedding cake. When I talked to high-tech startup entrepreneurs, some tend to focus on their fancy tech product - a big cake without filling and icing. They emphasize more on product viability and pay less attention to business viability. Bear in mind that your MVP has to demonstrate the real business value while solving a problem.  

Source: The cake model of product planning

You can find all kinds of training programs about Scrum. The Scrum Methodology website is a good reference site with numerous introduction videos and reference cards. If you want to understand Scrum systematically, Jeff Sutherland wrote a good book titled “Scrum: The art of doing twice the work in half the time.”