Mike Lyons explains Scrum, the framework that emerged from a 1986 Harvard Business Review article. A Product Owner prioritizes work, a cross-functional team delivers in sprints, and the cycle repeats with regular inspection and adaptation. About 75% of organizations use Scrum or a hybrid version.
1986.
At least 75% (reported in 2020).
Let me quote this Harvard Business Review article titled the New New Product Development Game. In today's fast paced, fiercely competitive world of commercial new product development, speed and flexibility are essential. Companies are increasingly realizing that the old sequential approach to developing new products simply won't get the job done. Instead, companies in Japan and the United States are using a holistic method. As in rugby, the ball gets passed within the team as it moves as a unit up the field. Now, you may be thinking to yourself, that's, that's interesting. Was that written like last year or earlier this year? No, it was written in 1986. This thing is like, you know, it's over 35 years old now. This article is titled the New New Product Development Game and you can look it up for yourself. But it is the first reference to product delivery being done using a holist method and introduces this term called Scrum. To quote another report, the 14th annual State of Agile report released in 2020 shows that scrum is still the most widely practiced agile framework. At least 75% of respondents practice Scrum or a hybrid that includes Scrum. Okay, so it's been around a while. It's the most popular framework there is. But like, what is it? It's founded on empiricism and lean thinking. The empiricism piece asserts that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what we observe and what we learn. We can't know everything up front, so instead let's do planning often, try things out and observe what happens. Lean is about reducing waste and focusing on the essentials. So Scrum employs this iterative, incremental approach to optimize predictability and control risk. It engages groups of people who collectively they have, have all the skills and expertise needed to do all of the work as a single unit, as a Scrum team. And just as in rugby, this team, the team works together as a single unit to, you know, move the ball downfield, move the piece of value downfield, to deliver a piece of value as quickly as possible. As a team, we don't get so hung up on sort of job titles. We're all collectively as a team working together at its core. There's really just a few things that Scrum teams do. Basically, there's a product owner who orders the work for whatever problem we're trying to solve into a ordered, prioritized list of things we might do called a backlog. Then there's a team that turns that selection of work into a working piece of value, a working piece of software that can be delivered in a small time box, a sprint, we call that. And then finally we stop and inspect the results of that, the thing that we delivered in that small time box, and then we adjust it for the next sprint, repeat. That's it. That's really all there is to Scrum. It's simple, it's a framework, it's not overly prescriptive, it's very adaptive, highly responsive to change and demands as clients needs change. So that's a bit of introducing you to Scrum, but. But now let's really begin to sort of go deep in detail.
