Agile is a method that is not applied in companies where the deadline of the projects is valued more than the quality of the projects, where sentences such as “The project needs to be completed by this date? It is very urgent!
Organizations that can be shaped according to market conditions and are open to change are Agile organizations. In traditional companies, the personnel do not have time to think, they do not have the authority to interpret, their own initiative is at a minimum level. Because the chain of command is very strict. And there is a manager in the company who knows everything. The ideas that employees have that can add value to the project or the company are ignored. This leads to demotivation over time and eventually to the loss of personnel.
Of course, it is not right to expect innovative and high value-added projects to emerge in environments where wrongdoing is not welcomed, covered up, and paid for with additional shifts, low promotions or small salary increases. In such projects, a patch is always made, or they are filled with inappropriate and irrelevant modules or classes, making a messy low-performance. However, in agile companies, mistakes are seen as tutorials that will take one step forward. With the experiences gained, mistakes that could make the project worse are prevented.
Agile companies are not a company where personnel performance is measured by what is written in weekly reports. Instead, they are structures where employees are valued and the impact they will create is prioritized rather than the size of the work done. Agile companies are a place where leaders who personally take part in projects, guide, help and motivate work, rather than managers who know everything and just do it.
What is Agile?
Agile is a process that allows a team to manage a project more efficiently by dividing it into several phases.
Although Agile has been partially applied in many sectors, especially in the software industry since the 1970s, it was fully defined with the Agile Manifesto published in 2000 by a group of developers looking for a new software development method with the influence of the Scrum methodology that emerged towards the end of the 1900s.
The Agile Manifesto defines 12 principles for Agile:
- Customer satisfaction
- Early and continuous delivery
- Openness to change
- Frequent delivery
- Collaboration between businesses and developers
- Motivated individuals
- Face-to-face interview
- Transactions with a clearly defined function
- Technical competence
- Simplicity
- Self-organized teams
- Edit, mirror and adjust
You may have heard the term Agile mostly with scrum methodology. So let’s explain the term scrum. Scrum is one of the many types of agile methodologies known for breaking projects into large chunks called “sprints”. It is an Agile method that consists of meetings, roles and tools to help teams working on complex projects collaborate and better structure and manage their workloads. Although it is known for its frequent use in the software industry, it can actually be used by all types of teams. You can even apply scrum methodology within a family. After all, every family is a small team serving a common purpose 🙂
Scrum is used to manage complex projects or by companies that are result-oriented, efficient and focused on innovation. Scrum is a very good project management system for customer-oriented companies as it is more adaptable to customer preferences thanks to its flexibility.
Agile Scrum Methodology
The combination of Agile philosophy and scrum framework creates the “Agile Scrum” methodology. Agile scrum methodology can be used for companies of all sizes. In fact, agile and scrum are two different methods and can be used separately; however, the benefits of using them together make this composite structure the most popular of agile methods.
While other project management methods emphasize building an entire product, mostly in a single end-to-end operation, the agile scrum methodology focuses on delivering several iterations of a product to provide stakeholders with the highest business value in the least amount of time.
Agile scrum methodology is a project management system based on incremental development. Each iteration consists of sprints of two to four weeks. The goal of each sprint is to build on established features and potentially deliver a deliverable product. Subsequent sprints are adjusted based on stakeholder and customer feedback to add more features to the product.
What are the benefits of agile scrum methodology?
Agile scrum methodology has many benefits. The biggest benefit is that it is flexible and adaptable. In this sprint-based method, feedback is received from the team and stakeholders after each sprint. If there are any problems or suggestions for change, the scrum team adapts the product to reach its goal more easily and quickly in the new sprints to be planned. In this way, all stakeholders of the project are happy because they are included in every stage of project management. This increases employee and customer satisfaction as well as organizational synergy.
Contrast this with a situation where you have to deal with customer discontent and change requests after a large part of the project, or worse, the entire project, has been completed without stakeholder involvement. Either you make major changes to the project, compromising performance and the algorithm, or you start the project all over again and incur more costs. This situation, which is common in traditional methods, shows how important the agile scrum methodology is. Based on this, we can conclude that agile scrum methodology also reduces costs.
Other benefits of agile scrum include the benefits it brings to the project in terms of creativity, innovation and quality, as ideas are taken from all stakeholders in each sprint.
In Agile scrum methodology, there are three main roles: scrum master, product owner and scrum team. Everyone is equally committed to the project. A team working for a single purpose. If we briefly talk about these roles:
Scrum master
The scrum master is the facilitator of the scrum development process. As well as organizing daily meetings with the scrum team, it ensures that the scrum rules are implemented as intended. The scrum master is a leader, not a manager. He coaches and motivates the team. It tries to remove obstacles to sprints and ensure that the team has the best possible conditions to achieve its goals.
Product Owner
The Product Owner is the person who tries to maximize the value of the product. This is not an easy task. He or she must make sure that the expectations of all stakeholders who will use the product or have it used are met. Accordingly, his/her main task is to set the expectations of the product and manage a scrum backlog, which is a detailed and constantly updated to-do list for the scrum project. He/she checks that each sprint achieves its goals and expresses his/her ideas to the scrum master or scrum team in the sprint meetings.
Scrum team
A scrum team is a self-organized group of three to nine people with business, design, analytical and development skills who do the work themselves to solve problems and produce deliverables. This team is responsible for achieving the goals of each sprint.
In Agile scrum methodology, there should be a scrum expert in the company or an external scrum expert consultant to ensure that scrum principles are applied correctly.
