Scrum is a pearl among project managers. Once you master this methodology, you will find several options to display results faster and more efficiently. There are scrum principles that are part of the team’s producitivity.
The goal to create the Scrum methodology was to make the development of projects more agile and reliable. Make it an efficient and productive way of working.
In Scrum work, it’s crucial to promote overcoming failures, self-organization of work, and self-adaptation of the team.
Scrum is a revolution in the traditional way of managing projects. It helps you work in multidisciplinary teams, with high productivity and commitment to the project. All this is to eliminate the meticulous measures of time and the plotting of huge Gantt Charts.
In this article, discover Scrum principles to increase your team’s productivity and deliver more results with your team in less time.
When Scrum came to life to improve productivity
There was a lack of efficiency in organizational work before Scrum had existed. This tool is important to avoid project delays, budget overruns, and failures in the result. Jeff Sutherland is responsible for creating Scrum, which is an efficient and fast method of managing and planning projects.
With it, it is possible to check each step to perform, techniques to use, and it is also possible to measure problems and repair them in real-time, avoiding that you notice them only at the end of the project.
A team works on a part of the project, delivers it, and then evaluates it for future optimized projects. No fear of modifying the steps of the process as the objective is to be in constant optimization.
One of the notable points of Scrum principles is the prototyping and feedback cycle. In Scrum principles, the focus of each sprint is having a small part of the project ready or a new functionality implemented.
However, the velocity is used to determine how much point a team can achieve on average on a normal sprint and then determines how many points they will agree to achieve in the next sprint iteration. The velocity should not be used to determine if the team is productive or not, it’s just a simple indicator based on past sprints.
If you want to increase the velocity of your team, you should focus on the optimal velocity over time rather than maximized velocity, which considers the quality of the end product. To help your team to be more productive, let’s review 5 principles that can help you power up your team’s productivity!
Here are 5 Scrum principles to increase productivity
1. PRODUCT BACKLOG
The construction of the Task Backlog is part of a kick-off meeting of the project, which involves all the Stakeholders that are part of the process.
In this meeting, a “brainstorming” is carried out to map the product requirements, and, from there, the team goes hunting for all the documentation, drafts, and emails available, to complement the information collected in the meeting.
Together, the project team, Product Owner, and Scrum Master consolidate the requirements into the “stories” they will develop from that moment on.
2. BUILDING STORIES
Stories are a group of tasks and tasks, in turn, are consolidated into post-its that will carry the following information: The description of the task to perform; The completion and acceptance criteria of this task, and; The relative sizing of the task.
From there, the team prioritizes post-its and carries out that the tasks that generate the most value for customers. At the same time, they require less effort to develop.
3. PLANNING MEETING
The Planning Meeting marks the beginning of a new Sprint, which the Product Owner conducts, and serves to define the activities that the team will be developed in the next work cycle.
In this meeting, the project team transfers to the “to do” column all the activities they must do in that work Sprint.
Thereafter, there are no activity replacements and no additional activities enter the Sprint.
If there is this type of need, the Product Owner should add a new task to the Backlog at the next Sprint Review and Planning meeting.
Furthermore, activities only go to the “done” column from the moment the customer can test them!
Scrum requires constant feedback!
4. RETROSPECTIVE MEETING
At the end of each Sprint, in the Retrospective Meeting, each team member answers three questions:
Is there anything we can do differently to speed up the work? Can we get rid of any items from the backlog? Is there anything we can delegate to other teams? Is it possible not to do some things? Can we reduce the scope of the project, even minimally?
5. DAILY MEETINGS
Daily Sprint Meetings last a maximum of 15 minutes and at the beginning of each workday.
At this meeting, the entire team involved in the project gathers standing in front of the task board, and, led by the Scrum Master, they quickly answer a few questions: What did you do yesterday to help the team complete the Sprint tasks? What will you do today to help the team complete the Sprint tasks? Which obstacles are hindering the team?
The purpose of daily meetings is not to point out the culprits but to level knowledge and identify bottlenecks in the process.
Important extra tips to find better results with Scrum
When you run Scrum principles, you have to deal with maintenance and delivering new features. It can be an urgent bug or another team that requires a developer to help them. It’s impossible to ignore the rest of the world when delivering a product. You have to deal with these interruptions in the current sprint.
What matters is your ability to face this kind of situation. If you schedule a buffer in all your sprints could help you avoid scope changes. The number of points depends on the number and time consumed by your current interruptions.
In case no interruption occurs, this time can be used at the end of the sprint to help on other tickets or even better, let a developer do some R&D for the project.
It’s a known fact that making your work visible helps the team to be more responsible for the delivery. Having metrics and other charts printed and displayed on walls also helps stakeholders and colleagues to know how the product is moving forward.
Update the burndown chart daily, display the Kaizen you want to achieve, show the customer or team satisfaction. You can also display the roadmap of what you are building to share the vision. There is plenty of information you can display to help everybody get an idea of how things are going.
Make all information visible to everyone on a wall. Displaying data helps the team to deliver quality and involves all the company.
Multi-tasking happens all the time, companies praise it. But multitasking reduces productivity and the quality of the result.
When a developer interrupts a task, he loses all the time he spent understanding the software. That is an invisible cost that you should be aware of.
It’s a good habit to limit our work in progress and focus on finishing work, not starting work.
GitScrum has plenty of Scrum features to help you produce more!
If you want to increase productivity in your team, GitScrum offers the best Scrum features!
Have questions on how to be more productive with Scrum?
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