It's all about Letting Go.
I'm the Technical Director at an established Software-as-a-Service provider, and I've committed to, without giving away our intentions to any competitor, building a "dominant" online enrollment product that's going to convert our company from a regional turboprop happily cruising at altitude and calmly building up the operating account a little bit each month, into a squadron of deadly stealth fighters, streaking and blurring across the sky, firing lethal laser beams into the hearts of all competitors, and, well, "dominating" the market.
So, what features does a "world class" enrollment system boast? Can I possibly get such a system built by the August 31 deadline agreed upon by me and the rest of
the executive team? Which features will be "nice to have", and which will be "need to have"? And what resources will be made available to me to complete this project?
This is a blog about Agile Scrum. Scrum is far and away
the
prime-time Agile development methodology, and this blog will be the tale of how
our team uses Scrum to work the project, and even more so, how our organization
is able to use and empower our team to deliver the needed results.
I've been using Scrum on projects since 2008, and have found that the more the team
commits to the methodology, the more the methodology benefits the organization.
Coming from a traditional "waterfall" background, as most do, I admit to some initial
hedging against some Scrum techniques, and I still think that some of the techniques
have higher leverage than others, but on this project, I intend to continue to increase
my commitment to the process, and trust that the result will be a higher utilization
of the intellectual capacity of the team, which in turn will provide the best possible
project result. For managers, Scrum really is all about letting go.