How To Explain Scrum To Your Company

Getting People To Work Together

Sam Walton was asked about the secret to Wal-Mart’s success to which he replied “We’re all working together; that’s the secret”. Sam’s definition of Wal-Mart’s success is a practical way to understand Scrum; a way to get people working effectively together. The Scrum Guide™ provides a more technical definition of Scrum as “a framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value.” While Scrum’s origin is product development, CEOs have an opportunity to use it to create far greater value than just the successful delivery of products. CEOs can leverage Scrum to maximize value for both customers and shareholders by getting an entire company to work together effectively.

When Asked – Why Scrum?

We need to work together effectively to achieve our company goals. The way we’ve worked together in the past has made achieving company goals a challenge. As a company, we’re adopting Scrum to serve our customers better, and save everyone time and our company resources. Scrum will group us into teams with the right skills to deliver value to our customers. Scrum will eliminate unproductive meetings while optimizing the way we collaborate. Scrum will clarify how we define, do, prioritize and approve work. Scrum will help us agree on guidelines eliminating distractions and roadblocks to our individual and collective contributions.

When Asked – What Is The Scrum Framework?

Scrum’s framework consists of 4 components; roles, events, artifacts, and rules. Roles define the specific functions of each member of our company. Events define the rhythms in which we’ll meet as a company, business units, and working teams. Artifacts define and organize the work to be done with rules helping everyone contribute with consistency. These 4 components work in unison to facilitate effective collaboration between teams both large and small, in specific business units as well as company-wide.

When Asked – How Will I Personally Benefit From Scrum?

How many meetings have you been in where you left feeling confused and unclear about what you needed to do next? How many times have you wondered if the work you were doing was going to help our customers? How often have you complained about how long it takes to accomplish large initiatives? How painful is it to have someone from the management team swoop and poop? Imagine if we systematically tried to eliminate all of these unpleasantries at work?

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