Scrum – make a successful project management
Scrum – another method to realize projects successfully in a short timeframe. If you have to realize a software project, your customer normally would like to see the progress of that project – this progress should normally be consistent and continuous. The methodology of Scrum sets this aspect always in the center point.
This sounds very easy: the project-team meets every day for a very short discussion – there, every team-member answer exact these 3 questions:
- What have you done the last 24 hours within the project?
- What are your next steps in the next 24 hours?
- What problems do you had the last 24 hours?
A project member (the so-called Scrum-master) has the task to solve the problems from all team-members that have arisen in the last 24 hours and to create clarity – he is the interface from the customer to the project-team and internal resources.
Basically after a short time using Scrum, you could see following positive aspects:
1. The project-team is very motivated, because there aren’t “marathon-meetings” any more – only about 5-10 minutes effort / person
2. The customer has a clear insight what’s going on with the success of his project
3. Because the result could be seen every time, changes could be made every 24 hours and the team could react very flexible
Microsoft itself works on some projects (first of all on those which are very time-critical) with this methodology. MSF – Microsoft Solutions Framework is the procedure, where all standard-projects in Redmond are build on. Right at this moment, Microsoft is working to include Scrum within MSF as the standard process for very time-critical software projects – it is not a conflict to MSF; it should be seen as an addition.
For those of you who are very interested in Scrum, I can suggest the book “Agile Project Management with Scrum“from Ken Schwaber (ISBN 0-7356-1993-X / http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/6916.asp). Very intensive concerned with this topic has my colleague in Redmond: Chris Flaat. He is Development Lead in the Visual Studio Core Team. His blog could be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/cflaat/.
There are also some educational resources (first of all for scrum-masters): http://www.rallydev.com/csm_registration.jsp - and at least a very good documented website with very good field reports about scrum: http://www.scrumalliance.org/
On this note: Good luck for your project – make it with scrum!
