What is Scrum?

What is Scrum?

Scrum is a framework that enables product development teams to solve complex problems and build complex solutions.

Origin of the word Scrum in Scrum product development.

If you search for Scrum on Google, you will often find the Scrum framework process images, but the inspiration for the name Scrum comes from rugby.

A sport featuring 15 players on each team, 8 of which form the Scrum – also known as the forward pack – who are often the protagonists in driving the ball up field to help the team score points or focused on wrestling the ball away from the opposing forward pack to prevent that team from scoring.

That hustle and bustle of focused, committed energy to accomplish a valuable goal – as a team – is the inspiration for the word Scrum.

But this is not the whole story.

What inspired Scrum and its name?

A Harvard Business Review white paper called ‘The New New Product Development Game’ was written by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in 1986, and in it the authors explored the reasons behind five (5) products becoming highly successful.

Five (5) products from completely different industries, from a copier machine to Honda (motor car), assessed to determine what each success had in common.

What were the primary reasons for that product succeeding despite fiercely competitive markets.

What they discovered was:

Interdisciplinary and self-organizing teams.Bottom-up knowledge, skills, and capabilities.Incorporation of rapid feedback loops.

These discoveries were described in a paragraph called ‘Moving the Scrum down field’.

This white paper was read by the cocreators of Scrum – Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland – and it was a Eureka moment for them, independently. Something which made perfect sense in the context of software development and complex product development.

When Ken and Jeff were considering what to call their new agile framework, that word Scrum, and the concept of moving a team forward in the game of rugby, became the perfect way to frame their new product development framework.

So, the work of Takeuchi and Nonaka played an instrumental role in the inception and development of the Scrum framework.

What the Scrum framework means to me, as an agile practitioner and trainer.

I like to think of Scrum as the rules of the product development game, in a complex environment.

We bring a team of people together, and despite complexity and uncertainty, we play the game of solving complex problems and developing complex solutions as best we can. We may well be navigating unknown territory, but we can bring a torch and safety rope to help us move forward.
The rules of Scrum are applicable for any open ended, non-linear game.

Scrum is purposefully lightweight and incomplete.

It doesn’t tell you exactly what to do, but it is designed to help you leverage empiricism and cope with complexity using enabling constraints. Transparency, inspection, and adaptation are the pillars of Scrum. They allow you in rapid iteration cycles to help you discover the best way forward.

There aren’t many rules in the innovation space, but I like to think of Scrum as a set of rules that allow us to play the game effectively.

Values and principles, supported by a framework of events and artefacts, led by a trio of accountabilities to act as a rock-solid guide rope when navigating unknown terrain.

Unlike rigid, robust project management methods, the rules of the product development game are open to interpretation.

We don’t follow the rules blindly simply because a book tells us to, instead:

We develop a hypothesis based on the knowledge and understanding we have now.We design an experiment to validate or disprove our hypothesis.We do the work and gather data, feedback, and evidence.We inspect the data, feedback, and evidence to inform what we should do next.We adapt, based on data and evidence, and respond appropriately.

Scrum helps you build the most valuable product or feature given the constraints that are present in the environment. The best you are capable of, in that moment in time, with a solid commitment to improving with each iteration and growing product development capabilities on a continuous basis.

About Effective Agile

Ralph Jocham is a Change Agent in Scrum // Agile // Coaching // Evidence Based Management and a Professional Scrum Trainer based in Europe.

As one of the first Professional Scrum Trainers in the world, Ralph has worked directly with cocreator of #scrum, Ken Schwaber, and has played an integral part in the course development of the #PSPO (Professional Scrum Product Owner) as well as the delivery of all #scrum.org certified courses.

If you’re looking to invest in training that transforms and empowers teams to successfully adopt #scrum or #agile, and create high-performance #productdevelopment environments leveraging the agile values and principles, visit https://effectiveagile.com/agile-scru...

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