What?
This came directly the dictator Product Owner of a project I have just started working on. Well, if we were doing Scrum, he would have been the ideal candidate for the Product Owner role – he met all the requirements.
His theory was that the project is already in crisis stage (hence bringing extra resources onboard) and there wasn’t time for the overhead that scrum brings. Which makes me wonder if he had ever actually been involved in an effective scrum team before. I mean sure, he knew the buzzwords and threw them around in the right context but what experiences has he been through that makes him think scrum would slow the process down? Let’s take a look at the scrum rituals:
Planning
Scrum usually involves some form of group planning (e.g. Planning Poker) which admittedly, does take some time. The time involved should be time-boxed but it is still time. This could be one of the Scrum aspects he feared would take up too much time and it’s valid. As a manager who isn’t actually a developer it can be difficult to see any value in your developers sitting around not developing.
Planning, like everything in scrum, should be time-boxed though. And even if it wasn’t, the project has brought on numerous new resources and a detailed planning session involving the whole team would make knowledge transfer between the new team and the existing team much faster.
Daily Standups
15 minutes a day isn’t a big chunk of time – even if you’re in crisis mode. It is however an important part of the focus and streamlining that scrum promises. This little morning (perhaps) ritual is probably one of the biggest contributing factors to Scrums success.
Reviews
Nothing brings clarity to the “are we there yet” question like a full review and demo to all the stakeholders. Nothing. If the team hasn’t done anything worth demoing, the public display of nothingness will help motivate the team to not let it happen again. These take time, but add far more value in terms of transparency than what they consume.
Retrospectives
A team under crisis is going to be under more pressure and a retrospective is the ideal outlet for frustrations and difficulties. It’s also a place for the product owner to shower the team with praise and thank them for all the effort.
But this is a crisis!
A crisis is possibly one of the best projects for Scrum. It adds lightweight structure to what would otherwise be chaos. It gives the team defined milestones (sprints) that they can use to measure progress against deadlines.
It also has the side effect of almost always being story based already. Most crisis projects I’ve been involved with in the past have had their project plans converted into Action Lists which with some minor tweaking can be made into Good User Stories.
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