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Scrum and its Shifting Perspectives

  

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by Ambika Patil

The Indian audience has been familiar with Scrum for quite a while now. People who may not be directly involved in Agile practices are also interested in how it works. I decided to take a look at some examples of what happens in our office to demonstrate how Scrum can help all parts of an organization.

SolutionsIQ India has slowly grown to an office that is bustling with people and activities. With the increase in people came changes in the way we manage our teams and sync our activities. Scrum, of course, is our forte and we use it liberally. The ways in which Scrum can be used to fit a particular company has been defined in our office.

We started off with a basic Kanban board with ‘to-do’, ‘in progress’, and ‘done’, which worked well for a while. When we started having more people and many other operations, we upgraded to swim lanes, and recently we started doing Scrumban. We introduced another column called ‘waiting for’, which fosters better coordination between different departments and helps maintain a workflow.

Here are excerpts from a small interview that I conducted among the non-coaches in our organization, which also includes people who have recently joined us and have had their first experiences with Scrum:

“It is common sense and can be incorporated anywhere.”
     - Technical Department

“It helps to sort and speed up the work I do.”
     - HR

“It provides a transparency where anyone can see what exactly the team is up to.”
     - Sales

The very fact that Scrum affects a complete organization and not just a team was why I chose non-coaches to comment about how they felt more connected and in sync with their team. 

What I would like to point out here is the way in which we began using the different facets of Scrum. As the organization grew, so did our use of the methodology. What we need is not a set of stringent rules and practices. We need a system which fits and modifies itself according to the needs of a company of any type. Scrum indeed was the best bet.