Certified Scrum Master - Don't get left behind

Certified Scrum Trainer Rowan Bunning is currently in New Zealand, working with Equinox to run a series of Certified Scrum Master courses. Rowan was Australia's first Certified Scrum Master and first Scrum Practitioner and has extensive experience leading, coaching, and training organisations in Scrum across Australasia and Europe. I took the opportunity to interview Rowan on why you need to explore Scrum in your organisation.

Brendon: Rowan, briefly for those who don't know, what is Scrum?

Rowan: Scrum is an iterative framework for agile project management and product delivery. It challenges cross-functional teams to deliver a potentially shippable set of functionality every iteration, providing the agility needed to embrace change and respond to it very rapidly in a way that may result in competitive advantage.

It allows organisations to gather feedback and leverage the learning that occurs on the way through projects, to build a solution that better aligns with customer needs. Scrum features a number of built-in risk reduction mechanisms that increase the likelihood of successful delivery and is particularly effective in an environment characterised by significant complexity, uncertainty and change.

Brendon: Why should software project professionals explore Scrum for their organisations?

Rowan: Well, according to an annual study by the Standish Group, approximately two-thirds of features in software systems being maintained today are seldom or never used! In my view, the current economic climate makes it even more critical that such waste be avoided. By making a customer representative responsible for prioritising requirements based on careful study of business value as well as project management concerns such as uncertainty and risk, Scrum helps organisations to build the highest value features first.

By doing so it typically achieves higher return on investment than alternative approaches within real-world constraints such as deadlines and budgets. Scrum also has a heavy focus on productivity and tends to double or triple productivity just as a starting point when first introduced. IT productivity expert, Caspers Jones, has reported that productivity gains of 600% have been seen repeatedly in well executed Scrum projects and a 'hyper-productive' Scrum team has been documented as achieving productivity of 900% over the industry average despite being distributed between four locations across two continents!

Scrum is now the most popular agile software development method in the world, so the bottom line is that your competitors will increase their agility using Scrum over the next few years. If your organisation fails to keep up with this, where does this leave you in respect to your competition? Certified Scrum Master and Certified Product Owner courses are one important way to develop Scrum capability in your teams.

Brendon: What are some of the ingredients you normally see in successful Scrum projects?

Rowan: In my experience, some of the things that contribute to successful Scrum projects are:

• a clear overall vision and well-articulated business goals that are discussed with all participants
• sufficient training in the Scrum framework and agile techniques for all participants to internalise the Scrum values and be fluent in implementation of the practical techniques
• guidance from experienced Scrum practitioners to avoid the common pitfalls
• active customer involvement on a daily basis throughout the project
• Scrum Masters who 'get it' and are able to play a servant leadership role without resorting to command and control
• teams that realise that with empowerment comes responsibility, who have discipline and take the 'organisation' part of 'self-organisation' seriously
• leadership from management to move the organisation away from what may be a culture of politics and apportioning blame to a culture of transparency, learning and continuous improvement.