The 3 Pillars of Scrum
Scrum is something that we hear a lot of today. In simple terms, Scrum is an effective way to build products. An Agile and Scrum course empowers you with the Scrum principles and practices which will help your organization to deliver the best quality products.
Scrum uses empiricism in order to adapt to the changing requirements of the client. Empiricism enables you to make decisions based on experience. Anybody with an Agile and Scrum certification would know that Scrum works based on facts, experience, and evidence. Progress in Scrum is based on observations and not plans.
The three pillars that uphold these empirical values are transparency, inspection, and adaptation.
1. Transparency
Transparency implies presenting the facts as it is. Significant aspects of the process should be visible to those responsible. All the day-to-day dealings between the people involved are transparent. They trust each other and collectively collaborate to attain a common organizational objective.
In order to work towards a common goal, the team members should have access to all the important information useful in development. Scrum promotes healthy communication through Scrum ceremonies within the team as well as through various Scrum tools. Some of these are product backlog, task boards, burn down charts, daily stand-ups, retrospective meetings, the definition of done and Sprint reviews.
Allowing visibility is a key advantage in Scrum with regards to the progress of the team and their work. The members responsible are recognized and appreciated for their efforts whenever the team has achieved something.
Well begun is half done. Knowing what the goal is and what is in the way is vital for the company to become successful. Similarly, a company with all its members having a clear idea of its goal helps it to move in the right direction.
2. Inspection
Scrum is critical about the work that is being done and how it is being done. In this context, critical is not about being negative, judgmental or about blaming someone else. Scrum is critical as it carefully observes something with an intent to improve it.
In order to detect undesirable variances, Scrum artefacts must be frequently inspected. For this cause, retrospectives and daily Scrums are held. Such healthy inspection habits enable a Scrum team to critically view their work from a different perspective, making it easier to find out mistakes and rectify them.
The first pillar plays a crucial role in inspection because without transparency it is very hard to inspect. So both these pillars collectively help the team to creatively and productively deliver products with the maximum possible quality.
Inspection is useful for both, the development team and the product team. With adept knowledge, the product team can get valuable feedback from the customers through inspection. This will help in knowing whether the product development is on the right track or not.
Demos are a means to inspect the product team while daily stand-ups and retrospectives are for the development team. Either way, Scrum is not interested in finding whose fault it is, rather it is about learning from those faults and finding ways to better them.
3. Adaptation
An inspection alone is useless unless the team is ready to change their ways according to the outcome. The team should be encouraged to make the necessary changes to either fix the problem at hand or experiment with the opportunities that come with the outcome.
Scrum fosters a “fail fast forward” approach which urges a team to find out about its failures early on so that it can be rectified easily before it gets out of hand. Thus, issues are uncovered and addressed quickly. In this way a good Scrum team will speed up as the project goes on.
Adaptation also helps the Scrum teams deal with changes like new priorities, change in leadership, a crisis, upsizing or downsizing, world events or a market disruptor. Traditional methodologies with all the works planned ahead will have a hard time dealing with the changes and adapting to a new reality.
The teams with Scrum need not go through change requests, budget negotiations, new contracts and other tedious processes. They can adapt to new situations and deliver valuable and relevant products right away to the client. Adjustments are made as soon as possible for the reason of minimum possible deviations.
Key Takeaway from the Pillars
The three pillars: transparency, inspection, and adaptation hold Scrum together. Strengthen these pillars and you’re sure to find success in Scrum and your business.
