When it comes to project management, Scrum stands out as one of the best agile project management frameworks for delivering high-quality products. One of the most important reasons behind the wild success of this popular framework is the scrum pillars that ensure stability and success.
These pillars allow the scrum team to share information openly, identify issues, and adapt to new changes for better outcomes. This article will explore the scrum pillars and their importance in achieving the product goals. Specifically, we will examine how to implement these pillars to enhance collaboration, productivity, and team efficiency.
So let’s get started.
The three pillars of the scrum framework are the underlying principles that help the scrum team deliver value in a complex, dynamic, and ever-changing environment. They encourage the team to continuously inspect their processes, adapt to new changes, and adjust when needed. The three pillars of the scrum are as follows:
Transparency is one of the most important pillars of the scrum framework. It ensures that all the important aspects of the work are visible to stakeholders, the development team, and other related personnel. This means the team should have a common understanding of the project goals, acceptance criteria, and what is expected from them.
Better Collaboration: When everyone has access to the same information, it fosters collaboration and communication within the team.
Improved Decision-making: With clear visibility of work progress, challenges, and issues, the team can communicate effectively and make decisions more efficiently.
Faster Issue Detection: By making team progress visible, the team can effortlessly identify the bottlenecks and remove them, before they turn into bigger problems.
Trust and Accountability: Transparency ensures that everyone understands their role and responsibilities and encourages them to take accountability for their actions. This fosters trust between the scrum team and stakeholders.
Alignment with Product Goals: Transparency in the reporting and review process ensures that product increment aligns with the product goal and vision, leading to high customer satisfaction and retention.
In Scrum, transparency can be maintained by using Scrum artifacts and events. Here are some of the popular ways to promote transparency in a scrum team:
Daily Standup: During this ceremony, team members share their daily agenda, what they completed yesterday, and what are the impediments. This helps the team track their progress toward sprint goals and resolve issues quickly.
Sprint Planning: This is the event where the team comes together to plan the work for the upcoming sprint and how to achieve the sprint goal.
Sprint Review: An opportunity for the scrum team to present the increment to stakeholders, gather feedback, and strive for continuous improvement.
Product Backlog: This provides a comprehensive list of all the work that the team needs to complete to deliver the product.
Sprint Backlog: It contains the list of user stories, tasks, and bug fixes that the team needs to complete to develop the increment.
Definition of Done (DOD): A set of criteria that an increment must meet to be considered complete.
Scrum Boards: Apart from scrum events and artifacts, scrum boards also play a critical role in ensuring transparency within the scrum team. The Scrum board provides a comprehensive overview of the work in progress, completed, and needs to be done. This allows everyone to track team velocity and take accountability for their work.
The second pillar of the scrum framework revolves around inspecting progress, identifying issues, and reviewing team performance. This pillar is deeply rooted in the empiricism philosophy of the scrum framework, which emphasizes decision-making based on observation, experiences, and predictions. Unlike traditional project management, scrum relies on iterative cycles where the team inspect and continuously improves the product quality.
Inspection is a critical scrum pillar that drives the success of the scrum team, product owner, and stakeholders. It enables the team to regularly review their progress, performance, processes, tools, and requirements, leading to better product quality and goal alignment. Consequently, the team becomes equipped to identify issues, detect bottlenecks, and overcome challenges.
Moreover, inspection drives a faster feedback cycle, enabling the team to customize products based on customer needs and preferences. This feedback helps the team make informed decisions about product direction and backlog refinement.
Regular evaluation and improvement are the core principles of the scrum framework. That’s why Scrum has events and ceremonies where the team regularly evaluates the team’s progress, and product quality to ensure customer satisfaction. Here are the important inspection points in the scrum:
Daily Standup: This is a short, quick daily inspection meeting toward the progress goal. Here team evaluates the progress and identifies deviations from the plan.
Sprint Planning: Before starting a new sprint, the scrum team collaborates to inspect the product backlog and pick up the highly prioritized items that align with the product goal.
Sprint Review: Once a sprint is completed, the scrum team and stakeholders sit down to inspect the newly developed increments and ensure they meet the user expectations.
Sprint Retrospective: This is a dedicated event for the scrum team where they evaluate the team performance and process quality during the previous sprint. They identify the process inefficiencies, team challenges, and opportunities for improvement.
Once the inspection is done, the process of adaption begins, where the scrum team responds to the feedback gathered from the inspection and implements the changes to improve product quality and performance. Adaption is critical for navigating the complexities and ever-changing requirements of modern product development. It enables the scrum team to stay agile, responsible, and customer-focused.
When the team identifies any deviation from the sprint or product goal it doesn’t go as planned, instead, they evaluate the situation and make necessary adjustments to align their goals. Most importantly, adaption doesn’t occur on the product level only, scrum also adapts new tools, strategies, and processes to enhance efficiency and productivity.
Adaption in the scrum framework offers various benefits that contribute to the success of the team and overall project such as:
Flexibility: Responding to evolving business environments, requirements, customer needs, and priorities can make the team highly flexible and responsive. As a result, the team stays strong and productive even in the face of uncertainties.
Better Product Quality: Continuous improvement evolves the product to meet quality standards and customer expectations.
Increased Stakeholder Satisfaction: When the team improves the product based on stakeholders’ feedback and requirements, it makes them feel empowered, engaged, and valued. This increases their satisfaction and trust in the development team.
Improved processes: Adapting new tools, strategies, and workflow processes enhances the framework efficiency and team’s practices.
The Scrum team can implement the adaptation pillar by grooming the scrum event and artifacts in the following ways:
Refine the Product & Sprint Backlog: If the team finds new changes, improvements, or fixes during the sprint review or sprint duration they can adapt the sprint and product backlog to facilitate them. This ongoing process ensures that the work items stay aligned with changing market trends and stakeholders’ expectations.
Sprint Review Feedback Implementation: Feedback is the cornerstone of the adoption process. The sprint review meeting provides stakeholders with an opportunity to give feedback on the increments. The team should use this feedback to make the necessary adjustments in the product backlog and add actionable items in the upcoming sprint.
Daily Standup Adaptation: Daily standup provides a critical platform for the team to discuss their daily progress, agenda, and potential bottlenecks. The team can use this opportunity to adapt their plans. If any blockers or obstacles are identified, the team can make immediate adjustments, such as reassigning tasks or providing additional resources to address issues. Additionally, if the team notices that their progress is slow, they can adapt their approach or reprioritize the work items to achieve the sprint goal.
The three pillars of the scrum framework are critical for successful scrum implementation. With the help of transparency, inspection, and adaptation, the team can effortlessly navigate the challenges and stay aligned with the product goals. However, successfully implementing these pillars might be a trickle challenge without a proper project management tool. Scrum Slate is an advanced agile project management tool that helps the team streamline their process, inspect team progress, and adapt changes throughout the project life cycle.
It comes with features like Scrum boards, backlog planner, sprint tracker, and real-time progress tracking. With Scrum Slate team can easily plan, execute, and deliver high-quality increments while catering to the ever-changing product requirements and stakeholders’ expectations. Start your free trial on Scrum Slate today and enjoy unlimited access to all premium features.