What are agile methodologies and how can they help your work teams
Agile methodologies are comprehensive strategies, marketing strategies, service management, and more, that drive organizations to manage their projects quickly and flexibly. These methodologies assist in the development of projects that require greater focus to meet customer needs.
In other words, an agile methodology is an innovative way of working and organizing workflows, which divides projects into parts, allows for on-the-fly adjustments, complements, and resolves stages in a short time.
With agile methodologies, the project is not planned or designed in advance; rather, as they develop, the project is defined. Thus, those involved work in specific periods, while each team member must execute a series of tasks. At the end of the task execution, each member or team delivers progress, receives feedback, and starts the process again, allowing necessary changes to be implemented during the process rather than at the end of the project.
If your SME has already taken the first step towards digital transformation, this is a good time to implement agile methodologies. They can increase the quality of your products or services while reducing costs and time.
SCRUM
Scrum is a process in which a set of best practices is regularly applied to work collaboratively, as a team, and achieve the best possible outcome from a project. These practices support each other, and their selection is based on a study of how highly productive teams work.
In Scrum, partial and regular deliveries of the final product are made, prioritized by the benefit they bring to the project recipient. Therefore, Scrum is especially suitable for projects in environments where quick results are needed, where requirements are changing or poorly defined, and where innovation, competitiveness, flexibility, and productivity are essential.
In Scrum, a project is executed in short, fixed-duration time cycles (iterations that are normally 2 weeks long, although in some teams they are 3 or even 4 weeks, the maximum limit for real product feedback and reflection). Each iteration must provide a complete result, a final product increment that can be delivered with minimal effort to the client when requested.
Profiles and roles
Within SCRUM, we can find three main roles or profiles:
Scrum Team. It consists of the members of the work teams who collaborate to be more efficient in addressing and completing the various tasks and processes.
Product Owner. This profile is closely linked to the client, acting as their voice within the project. They are responsible for ensuring that the project follows the established objectives at all times.
Scrum Master. The main function of this role is to help the scrum team meet the established forecasts when addressing the project. They are responsible for facilitating everything necessary to overcome problems and obstacles, and for ensuring the flow of information among all participants in a sprint.
SCRUM Phases
The SCRUM methodology is divided into five phases:
Sprint planning. Sprint planning is the first phase of SCRUM where it is described what tasks are assigned to each member of the work group, as well as the time they need to complete them.
Scrum team meeting. These are usually short daily meetings held by work teams to evaluate the work done, what will be addressed that day, and what problems have arisen or are anticipated to arise.
Backlog refinement. This is a review of the tasks and their evolution by the Product Owner in order to assess the time and effort spent on each task and to resolve any issues encountered along the way.
Sprint Review. These are meetings that also involve the client, and their goal is to show the results obtained. The presence of the client is essential to achieve real and quality feedback and to create a closer and more productive relationship.
Retrospective. This is a final meeting after the project concludes where everything that has happened during the sprint is reviewed (what was done well and what was done poorly, and what the main difficulties faced were). The goal is to gain knowledge to improve in future projects.