3 Ways Scrum Can Help Transform Your Business
“Human persons are willed by God; they are imprinted with God's image. Their dignity does not come from the work they do, but from the persons they are” (Pope St. John Paul II, “On the Hundredth Year [Centesimus annus]).
Whenever I’m asked the standard “What do you do?” question and inform people I am a Scrum Master, I usually receive two responses: a confused look or a chuckle (sometimes both), followed by, “I’m sorry, a what?”
It’s understandable; it’s not a word that comes up often, especially not in Catholic communities. I see it as a missed opportunity, though, because it can help many, if not most, organizations — including Catholic ones.
The Scrum Framework
Scrum, named after the game play in Rugby, is a project management framework created in the early 1990s by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland to improve the process of product development, specifically software development. Scrum teams usually focus on one big project at a time and divide work into sprints. Sprints are typically two weeks long, but they can go up to a month depending on the project. There are meetings, roles, and deliverables involved in each sprint to ensure that the team realistically estimates, manages, and completes the work.
Though originally established for software development, Scrum is now used by organizations across all industries and service lines to solve complex and unpredictable problems and help transform their business. Here are three ways it can help yours do the same:
1. Build Stronger, Happier Teams
The Scrum framework is built around respect for people by empowering teams to be self-organized and cross-functional. “Self-organized” means the team chooses what to work on (rather than being assigned work) and can have tradeoff discussions with management on deadlines. Cross-functional teams consist of team members from every function of the organization that’s relevant to the project at hand. The result is a team that is highly collaborative, communicates openly to resolve any conflicts, and has ownership over its work — a stronger, happier team that performs well and enjoys its work.
2. Save Precious Project Time
What makes Scrum so powerful is its iterative approach to projects. The Scrum team completes a small chunk of the project at a time and then immediately presents it to the stakeholder for approval. For example: A team is building the company website. First, it builds a prototype of the home page at the end of a sprint and then presents it to the vice president of marketing for feedback. This way, if the vice president asks for edits, the team knows to take that feedback into account when building out the rest of the website, instead of waiting until the very end, when the website is completed, to start from the beginning.
3. Improve Continuously
Scrum emphasizes continuous improvement and constant feedback loops between the team and everyone else involved with the project. At the end of every sprint, the team looks back on the sprint, has a discussion around what went well and where there are areas of improvement, and comes up with action items to implement or keep for the next sprint. This meeting, aptly called the retrospective, is unique in that the manager of the team is not allowed to attend, so the team members themselves can have an open and candid discussion. Since Scrum teams have a retrospective every two weeks (or every month) until the completion of a project, there is no end to how much a team and its workflow can improve.
Scrum is great — but it doesn’t work for every organization and every team. If you have no problem with the way you and your team currently manage projects, then there is no need to make a change. On the flip side, if you do want to try doing Scrum with your team, know that it will be a process. Change is always hard, and people will resist and try to shut it down when they don’t see immediate results.
It all becomes worth it when it starts working — teams become more self-organized; inefficiencies are eliminated; conversations are more open and honest; and you start to ask yourself, “Why isn’t everybody doing this?” (And then you become a Scrum Master. Just kidding!) If nothing else, the next time someone tells you they are a Scrum Master, you will know what that means and make them feel seen.
Further Reading
If you would like to learn more about Scrum and its implementation, here are a few places to start:
Isabel Yu is the director of strategy and operations for Catholic Women in Business. During the work week, she is a Certified Scrum Master with a career background in Marketing, Advertising Operations, and IT Project Management. She graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park with bachelor’s degrees in information systems and marketing, as well as a minor in tech entrepreneurship. A Taiwanese American cradle Catholic, Isabel is often the token Asian or the token Catholic in the room. She finds communities imperative in helping to navigate such situations and aims to help others with similar experiences do the same. Armed with a confirmation saint who is the patron saint for businesswomen, Isabel is passionate about using creative, technical, and business skills to bring glory to God in the secular world. Connect with Isabel: LinkedIn | Instagram