Friday, 19 September 2014

The world is going agile. Are you?

The world is going agile. Are you?
In the face of the global economic turbulence, organizations are forced to become nimble and agile so that they can respond to market changes quickly. Over the last few years, many organizations have adopted adaptive project management methods like Agile to increase the efficiency of their project management function. Among the different Agile frameworks, Scrum in particular has become extremely popular in most of the organizations.
While more and more organizations are adopting Scrum as their preferred framework for managing projects, they need to overcome the initial challenges in the transition process. As with any change, there will be some resistance during the transition to Scrum. Middle managers will typically fear their loss of role or loss of authority. They may not understand their new role or how they contribute to the success of the team. People who are invested in the old methodology will also typically resist the change. These people may be systems engineers or other related positions that fear losing their role as a result of changing to Scrum.
The two basic methods of transitioning to Scrum are top down and bottom up. In top down, the transition is widely communicated. There is an effort to provide education about the change to everyone involved. This communication can be a source of change resistance. The other possibility is to change things gradually within the organizational culture. Then, the transition to Scrum will be incremental.
Another aspect of transition to consider is how much of the organization requires a transition to Scrum methods. The entire organization could be transitioned at the same time. However, this method is more susceptible to problems that may result in interrupting profit generating activities. Therefore, it is more advisable to transition different divisions in an iterative fashion to reduce risk and to provide lessons learned for future iterations.
For a start-up organization or who has a fairly clean slate, it is easy for them to adopt Scrum. However, if your organization is used to traditional project management environment, there is no doubt that you will face lot of challenges at the beginning.  It is a good idea to hire some Scrum Experts to help you in the transition process. Also, training plays a pivotal role here. It is important to train your whole project team before you start using Scrum. There are many professional training organizations who offer Scrum training around the globe. Also, there are many training programs which are associated with some recognized Scrum certifications. As a matter of fact, many organizations prefer these training programs because of several reasons – 1) employees get trained in Scrum, 2) employees can earn a professional certification at the end of the training program (of course after taking the certification exam) which in turn increases the motivation of employees, 3) certification exams also help organizations to measure the effectiveness of the training program and employee performance in a more tangible manner.
If you are trying to implement Scrum and are facing issues which seem to be uphill, do not give up quickly as the benefits of implementing Scrum is far-fetched than the initial challenges.

 To know more click on: http://www.scrumstudy.com/blog/

Thursday, 4 September 2014

Iterative Product Development

The iterative product development involves developing the product in small portions and receiving the customer feedback/review at the end of each portion. This method is particularly useful in software development projects and is one of the basic principles of Scrum methodology. The concept is, more quickly you deliver the product to the user, the quicker you can learn whether the product matched the acceptance criteria and the need of the end user. Scrum follows an iterative and incremental approach to product development, making it possible to incorporate change at any step in the development process. Thus Scrum prevents you from getting into long and indefinite product development life cycle which may go on for a long period without knowing what actually works for the user and what doesn’t.
The major advantage of iterative product development is that it offers sufficient room for accommodating the new needs/necessities without disturbing the whole project. In complex projects, the customers may not have a concrete idea regarding what the end product should look like and what are their actual requirements. The iterative product development model is more flexible as it allows changes requested by the customer can be included as part of the project.
Another benefit of iterative product development is that it offers a steep learning curve for the Development Team members and allows course correction. All the people involved get better understanding of what needs to be delivered as part of the project and also they will be aware of the errors or challenges which they would have come across in the last iteration. Thus this approach also reduces risk and you will be able to produce a working product at the end of each sprint. Scrum projects are completed in an iterative manner delivering value throughout the project lifecycle. In large projects, various cross-functional teams work in parallel across Sprints, delivering potentially shippable solutions at the end of each sprint. After the Sprint is complete, there will be a Sprint review meeting during which the deliverables will be presented to the product owner. The PO may accept or reject the Sprint output based on the Acceptance Criteria. The rejected stories go in to the next sprint.

In iterative product development, the Backlog Grooming and Prioritization are important factors in delivering maximum value to the customer. It’s the responsibility of the PO to ensure that the product backlog items are prioritized based on the value to the customer and the items with more value should go into the sprint early.