On Monday (24th October 2011), I attended The Scrum Gathering in Menara PKNS Petaling Jaya. At first, I was quite lost because I did not know any single thing about Scrum, but after a few hours I began to understand about Scrum and how it works. I got many things tolearn from it.
The speaker is Vernon Stinebaker, an expert guy from Scrum. He works in the IT side for about twenty five years now. He motivated all of us that, in order to have success business you will need an agile environment but unfortunately the awareness of an agile environment is still low in most of companies in Malaysia. He told us that in order to have an agile environment we must apply the five values of Scrum which are courage, focus, commitment, openness and respect. In Scrum, we have Self-organizing teams because as what he said, you can never motivate people by telling them what to do. I do like everything he said during the gathering and I like this kind of type of working environment.
And this morning, my seniors explained more about Scrum to me and now I have a better understanding in it. So, what is Scrum actually? Scrum is an agile process that allows us to focus on delivering the highest business value in the shortest time. Scrum has three roles, three artifacts, five ceremonies and five values which will help the company to achieve and produce the highest business value.
But then, can we apply this Scrum into our daily life? In my opinion, the five values that are taught in scrum, can be applied into our daily life as well. To respect and to be respected is one of the important key in our life, having a full commitment from the start until the end when we do something will lead us to a good result. Openness to other people by sharing things that will give benefit to a lot of people (not just keeping it to ourselves), keep the focus in one thing till it’s done so it would not get messed up with other things. Moreover, the last one is by encouraging people to do good things that we practice
As student with a bunch of assignments and projects, we can use all of these five values when we have different type of group assignment and we can also in our social life so that we can achieve our goals. And how will Scrum benefit the companies in general and Consoci8 in particular? Since we apply the Scrum in Consoci8 by using table and graph to picture it, we know the progress of the project properly and we can finish the project faster. This can really make our customer happy with our works and make them come back again to do the business with us.
In a conclusion, Scrum is good to be used as a tool of project management to check the progress in the development of the IT side. In my opinion, Scrum is more complicated than what I assumed. Understanding and applying the agile environment and all of the roles, artifacts, ceremonies, and values of Scrum are not always easy especially when it comes to the customer. Most of the customer tend to disengaged with the development team who works on the product and putting pressure on them near the dateline which is not professional. If the customer wants to get engaged with the development team and knowing the progress of the product then it would be easier for them to know what the customer wants and can finish the product faster. In overall, I liked to use Scrum and I can say that I’m lucky enough to have the opportunities to works in Consoci8 which has been using Scrum for about two years and maintaining the agile environment in their office.
