What is Scrum and why should you consider it for your projects?

If you follow us on social media or specialize in project management, then you must have heard of the Scrum method, however, we will review this topic because here we will tell you everything you need to know to be successful in your company and what applications. It can help you do just that.

Let's start by explaining what Scrum is. It is an agile project management method used in companies that need to deliver results frequently. It focuses on collaboration, flexibility and transparency, so it can quickly adapt to needs, customers, or markets.

Scrum Roles

It has several roles, mainly:

Scrum Master: person who is responsible for ensuring that Scrum practices and values are followed by the team, so it must be trained in this methodology.

Product Owner: is the person responsible for defining the project requirements and prioritizing the work of the team, so it must have a clear understanding of the project requirements to be able to collaborate with stakeholders.

Work Team: They are in charge of designing and developing the project.

Scrum Events

In Scrum, the steps that must be followed during the whole implementation process in your project are known as events, we will explain them in more depth below.

Product Backlog

The first thing you must do, besides having a dedicated team, is to create a Product Backlog, which is more complicated than it really is. To do this, you have to define the objectives of your product, taking into account what you want to achieve. The product owner must work with the customer to identify and capture all the requirements and desired functionality, which must be concise and understandable.

Subsequently, each element should be assigned a priority, and you should implement techniques such as poker planning to give an initial estimate of how long each task will take. All items should be broken down into smaller tasks to ensure a thorough understanding of the team. This backlog should always be updated to accommodate the product, and we will let you know when this can be done later.

Sprint Planning

Once the backlog is built, you must plan the sprint. These are work cycles with a fixed duration (two weeks to one month). Ideally, during each sprint, the team will work to complete a set of backlog tasks.

Daily Scrum

Dailies consist of short daily meetings, ideally 15 to 30 minutes, during the sprint to discuss progress and the plan for the day, with each team answering three simple questions:

• What did I do yesterday?
• What am I going to do today?
• Are there barriers to my progress?

Now, if you find that meetings are taking too much time because you manage too many projects, or your resources have other projects to work on. You can manage daily meetings, weekly meetings, or maintain projects through messaging in a way that suits your visibility.

Conduct reviews and retrospectives

A task review should be held at the end of each sprint and should be a meeting where the team is responsible for showing the completed work to the customer for feedback. Similarly, there should be a post-delivery team meeting to get an overview of what worked for the sprint and what can be improved in the next sprint.

Adjust and repeat

Once you have done the retrospective, you should meet with the team to adjust the backlog and the next sprint to keep working and repeat the process until you have delivered the final version of the product.

What are the advantages of scrum?

As you can see, scrum is a simple methodology, it sounds intimidating, but when your team gets used to the processes, meetings, and ways of working, you can achieve greater efficiency and a very good result. It is an ideal methodology for projects that are constantly changing direction.

There are several reasons why you should consider Scrum for your projects, we will tell you about them below:

Flexibility

It easily adapts to changes in the project, allowing the team to reorganize the work and priorities according to the needs of the client or the market.

Early delivery of results

Focuses on early and frequent delivery of results, which allows the client or end user to see and test the developed functionalities before the final delivery and make the necessary changes to have an excellent quality product.

Increased collaboration

There is constant collaboration and communication between the team and the client, allowing feedback so that the client is very satisfied.

Greater transparency

This point goes hand in hand with the previous one, since constant communication promotes transparency because it provides great visibility of the project progress to the Scrum Master and the customer, which also allows a more informed decision-making.

Increased team motivation

It provides a collaborative work environment and a greater sense of responsibility and autonomy for the team, which can increase motivation and commitment.

Scrum monitoring applications

In addition to being an easy to apply methodology, there are also tools to help you manage the projects you decide to use, here are some that we recommend.

Jira

This, without a doubt, is BluePixel's favorite tool, and we'll tell you how to use it. It was developed by Atlassian, its purpose is to help teams developing digital products to plan, track and manage the progress of their projects.

How to use it?

First you must create a project in Jira, so you must start by identifying project goals, team members, due dates, etc.

Next, you need to create the issues, which can be tasks, bugs, problems, or requirements. You can now import your outstanding work directly into your project if you have already created it in a Google Spreadsheets file. You should include the title, priority, and status.

As needed, these issues can be updated. In addition, you can designate a team member to handle or resolve it, and you can track progress by viewing statuses such as “open,” “in progress,” “resolved,” and “closed.” For project clarity, issues can be aggregated into broader epics.

Similarly, you can create reports and graphs with this tool to see how the project is progressing. Status, time spent and pending work graphs are just a few examples.

Trello

This is an online project management tool used to organize tasks and projects visually. It is perfect if you need to visualize tasks, organize them in lists and assign them to team members.

How to use it with Scrum?

For each sprint, you can make a dashboard with lists that correspond to the Scrum workflow. The description of each task, the assigned team member, due date and other details can be added to the cards representing the individual tasks to be completed.

Each list can represent a development phase, such as “Backlog”, “In Progress”, “Review” and “Completed”.

Here is a short tutorial on how to create your project:

You must first create a dashboard to keep track of your project. Then you will have to name it and choose the privacy, if you choose to make it a "Workspace" you will be able to give access only to your team members to keep it private.

Once you have done this, your project will open. In it you will be able to add the columns mentioned above.

You will be able to assign tasks, give them a description and assign them to a specific team member.

Asana

A project and task management tool much like Jira, it allows you to collaborate and work more efficiently.

How to use it?

First, a project must be created before tasks can be generated. Then, tasks can be customized to meet the needs of the project by adding details such as a description, a deadline and the team member who will be responsible for completing them.

Due to the existence of statuses: open, in progress, pending, under review and completed, you can monitor the development of tasks and projects. You can comment on tasks in the same way.

You can also create Gantt charts, status reports and time spent reports to see the progress of your project. Furthermore, you can also incorporate additional features such as bug tracking and time management tools.

Here we will show you the basic steps to create and track your project in Asana. First you must click on the option to add a project, we recommend you to start it as a blank project.

Once the project has been created, by choosing the list view you will be able to see in the left column the categories "Pending tasks", "In progress" and "Finished". As well as the people to whom the tasks have been assigned and the due date.

There is also a dashboard version where you can view the progress of tasks in the above categories in columns. As you can see below:

You also have a timeline view that will show you the progress of the tasks according to the date and time spent on them.

Likewise, you have another calendar option in which you can visualize your tasks in a different way.

As you can see, Asana is a very visual tool.

Scrumwise

It is an agile project management tool based on the Scrum framework. The basic operation of Scrumwise can be summarized in the following steps.

How to use it?

Like Jira and Asana, you will need to start by creating a backlog, which can be divided into user stories that detail the tasks in more detail. Then, the tasks should be prioritized (ordered in terms of importance). Once you've done that, you should set up the sprints to finish in a specific time frame (between one and four weeks). Each team member can be assigned a task that must be completed before the end of the sprint.

In addition, it has the ability to provide sophisticated features such as reporting, task dependencies and time tracking.

Here's how to get started with Scrumwise

At startup you will be able to grant permissions listed as the Product Owner, Stakeholders and team members to collaborate

Once you create a backlog, you can view its progress as if it were a loading bar.

When you open the sprint you will be able to see the remaining days and the tasks that are assigned for that period.

Other methodologies

Kanban

It is a visual management system that focuses on continuous delivery and workflow optimization.

Extreme Programming (XP)

Agile methodology that focuses on software quality through practices such as pair programming, continuous integration and automated testing.

Lean

Focuses on rapid delivery and elimination of waste through continuous improvement of the development process.

Crystal

Focuses on adapting to the situation and continuous improvement through collaboration and communication between the development team and the customer.

Within BluePixel we prefer to use Scrum as a methodology, so you can find a lot of information about it in our social networks and in our blogs. However, as we explained above, you should choose the one that best suits your needs as a company and the needs of your projects. Which one would you pick?

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