Scrum: The Key to Streamlining Your Team’s Workflow and Boosting Productivity
The path to agility for a company is difficult, and becoming agile requires significant changes in the team’s thinking, responsiveness, and behavior, which naturally is challenging. Unfortunately, many organizations underestimate the level of these challenges, and their lack of preparedness or insufficient resources can lead to the failure of this transformation.
In the path to agility, there are tasks that we think accelerate our speed, but on the other hand, there are tasks that really increase our speed:
- Starting new tasks ≠ Finishing remaining tasks
- Doing tasks in parallel (a large number of tasks in progress) ≠ Doing tasks in series (a limited number of tasks in progress)
- Filling the schedule with small tasks ≠ Including comprehensive and transparent goals in the schedule
- Specialization and one-dimensionality of team members ≠ Multi-tasking and multi-specialty of team members
- Quickly starting a project and new tasks, regardless of testing ≠ Allocating time to respond to feedback and testing
- Focus on quantity and output volume (fix it later) ≠ Focus on the quality of the output (fix it now)
- Hiring more people ≠ Effort to equip infrastructure, environment, and quality
- Abandoning new team members in conflict ≠ Careful integration and familiarity with the work process of new members
- Defining individual duties ≠ Team goals, pairing, collaboration, and teamwork
- Monitoring productivity ≠ Encouraging appropriate cooperation and interaction, even if it is chaotic
- Quickly getting into action ≠ Group research and investigation before starting
- Everyone busy with their work with their heads down ≠ Silence and focus while also communicating and collaborating
- Design, then implementation and construction ≠ Participating in design and pairing with the development team and UX
- Measuring average output speed ≠ Measuring average impact and growth speed
- Stakeholders review and approve ≠ Stakeholders support with regular participation
- Finding a way to bypass obstacles ≠ Attacking and collaborating to overcome obstacles
- Doing work without considering its effects ≠ Prioritizing tasks based on their value for the project
- Blindly following plans ≠ Ability to respond and adapt to changes
- Checking the final output at the end of the project ≠ Inspecting activities at each stage and adjusting them accordingly
We need to prioritize tasks based on their importance. We may say that all tasks are important, but in Scrum, importance means what will have the most value for the project? (Start with these first). Every few weeks, we should stop what we’re doing, review what’s been done, and see if the work that’s still valuable and prioritized needs to be done. Can we do it better than before? This is a simple idea, but its implementation requires thinking, self-reflection, honesty, and organization.
Scrum asks why tasks take so long and require so much effort, and why we’re so bad at understanding how long tasks take and how much effort they require. Scrum creates a structure in our learning process that enables the team to evaluate both what they’ve created and how they’ve created it. The Scrum framework controls how teams work and provides tools for them to organize themselves and improve the speed and quality of their work quickly.
Scrum is based on a simple idea: every time we start a project or task, why don’t we systematically check to see if what we’re doing is on the right track? Is it really what people (stakeholders) want? And ask ourselves if there’s a way to improve the way the work is done, both in terms of speed and quality? And what may be holding us back from doing that work properly? (This is called the inspection and adaptation cycle)
