is SCRUM useful for the project's success? [closed]

Question

I work for a company as a Project Manager. My company want us to get training in SCRUM and is sponsoring the training. So is SCRUM useful for the project's success?

Should I go for the SCRUM training?

Answer 1

Short Answer: The success of SCRUM methodology will depend upon your company's culture.

Longer Answer: If you already have or are at least willing to switch to iterative, incremental, and agile software development approaches for your projects then SCRUM methods will help with the management of those projects.

However, bear in mind that the benefits do not happen over night, and there is no silver bullet to solve all of your problems. Getting used to SCRUM and its sprint planning takes time and it requires some additional investment of time up-front before you will see the benefits. But, once it is in place and adjusted to your company's culture it will create a straight line to faster phase delivery and increased customer satisfaction.

Go here for a good starting reference - wiki article Scrum.

Answer 2

Is Scrum useful? It can be or it can be a monumental waste of time and effort. It can make a development team more productive or it can create a morale destroying sense of micromanagement. Like any tool, it's how it's used and if it's right for the role.

For example, at one company I worked at, my team was doing piecemeal maintenance work on several different projects. There was no reason to do daily stand-ups and the like. But, our manager had to get his company mandated Agile/Scrum responsibilities in, so we wasted time, often more than 15 minutes, each morning doing this. But, at another company, my team was working fast to get a project completed. Having the daily stand-ups worked well and helped us coordinate our tasks.

Should you get the training? Of course! Having Scrum and Agile training on your resume is a plus, especially if you're in a project/team manager role.

Answer 3

SCRUM is a useful tool; however, it is more of a hinderance than a help if you don't know what you're doing. So if you are going to use it at all, please, please, PLEASE get some sort of training! :)

Answer 4

Definitely get some training.

Scrum can be a very useful tool to keep organized and create better goals for your team. It's going to take more than training to get the full effects out of Scrum; you're going to need a very strong product owner, and some change in culture. If all goes well, your team will gain a lot more focus and work more efficiently.

However, the extra work and ceremony of Scrum can get in the way of real work or cause quality problems if you are missing some pieces. If you are going to try Scrum, you'd better go all in, and see if you can get your boss to get agile training too.

Answer 5

Scrum doesn't do anything.

Scrum only helps you discover problems in the way you work and identify waste incurred in your process and team.

“Scrum works with idiots. You can take a group of idiots that maybe didn’t even go to school, don’t understand computer science, don’t understand engineering techniques, hate each other, don’t understand the business domain, have lousy engineering tools and uniformly they will produce crap every increment. This is good. You want to know at the end of every iteration, where you are.”

-Ken Schwaber

That means that using Scrum you will notice that your project is going to fail if you don't change anything within two or four weeks into the project, and not a year later when you might not be able to do anything about it.

But this is not only about working in iterations. This is mainly about evaluating your work every iteration and making changes to the process and team at a constant pace.

And every one of the rules in Scrum is designed to make you do that:

1. Fixed timeboxes to force you to iterate at a constant pace.
2. A planning meeting at the start of the sprint to force you make plans about what will happen during the sprint.
3. Daily meetings to force you to detect deviations from the plan every day.
4. A retrospective meeting to think about the reasons you didn't reach the goals set at the start of the sprint, or about what you did well and need to keep doing to reach your goals for the next sprint.

Again, if you think about it, Scrum is all about detecting waste to eliminate. It is your responsibility to actually eliminate that waste.

So, to answer your question:

• You can use Scrum. Which will discover problems on your process and team. And you can then start eliminating those problems to improve constantly. Scrum will be useful.

Or

• You can use Scrum. Which will discover problems on your process and team. And you can simply ignore those problems and keep doing the same things over and over. Scrum will not be useful.