When the Košice IT Valley cluster approached me to come to Profesia Days to talk about teamwork and Scrum methodology, I knew it would be a challenge. People from literally every area come to such events, we never know in advance who will come to listen. That’s why I wanted to grasp the topic in such a way that truly everyone would understand it. Without complicated terms. So I transferred Scrum to a situation that everyone knows very well – tidying up on Saturday.
Imagine a common household in eastern Slovakia – mother, father, four children and a two-storey house. Typical Saturday, tidying up needs to be done. But the parents have to go to Poprad to help the granny, because she wants to clean the windows today. And so in the morning, they call their eldest son and ask him to tidy up the house with his siblings, for they are already old enough now. Everything should be ready by 6:00 p.m. The eldest brother is responsible and would like to accommodate the parents’ wishes, but he knows his siblings and so the discussion begins. They won’t be able to do everything by 6:00 p.m., for example, the kitchen was cleaned on Wednesday, so can they leave it out? The parents agree and leave.
At breakfast, when all the children get up, the brother explains the situation to them and they decide on who cleans what. The youngest sister is diligent, she likes tidiness. She suggested that she’ll keep an eye out to see if everything can be done on time. One of the younger brothers is a total slacker and the other one is somewhere in the middle, with good motivation, he’ll do what’s necessary, otherwise rather not. Since they know each other, just to be safe, they say that they’ll go to the kitchen every two hours, have something sweet and tell each other how they’re doing.
With the first sweet, everyone says that it’s great, everything is going well and on time. With the second one, some problems appear, because the slacker brother lied the first time. He hasn’t even started yet. In addition, the parents called to say that aunt Anka will come to visit at 6:30 p.m. and she would certainly look even at the highest shelf in the kitchen. So the kitchen needs to be tidied up as well.
So the siblings sit down to lunch, which their mother prepared for them in advance, and reschedule the tidying up. Neither aunt Anka nor the parents will smell the sheets in the rooms, so there’s no need to change them. It’s more important to clean the slacker’s room and the kitchen. The siblings joined forces and at 6:00 p.m., each proudly presented their work. And then, when aunt Anka was gone, all the kids sat themselves down in the living room and decided that the slacker needs to get better and the next time they’ll do it in such a way that it’ll be less stressful.
This is approximately how development works using the Scrum methodology. Parents are clients, the eldest brother who understands the client’s requirements and is able to correctly interpret them to the team, is the product owner, the youngest sister is the Scrum master and other siblings are the development team.
The individual meetings are Scrum events. PAt breakfast, the children did planning, had a short stand-up every two hours, and at lunch, when the requirements changed, they had to reschedule things as part of a larger stand-up. The final presentation of the rooms is a demo for the client and the very final meeting where the siblings said what was good and what was bad, is a retrospective.
All events are equally important, but each role may consider one of them more important. For the product owner, it can be the planning, in order to be able to explain the requirements to the team and make sure they understand them. For the client, it’s the demo for the presentation of the results, and for the team, it’s stand-ups where they can receive guidance and help from colleagues. And for the Scrum master, the most important thing may be the retrospective, where they see how satisfied the team is, what its weaknesses are, where they can motivate people to together set the course of other sprints better. I’ll write more about the events, tips on how to do them effectively and the requirements that must be followed, but next time.
Although unknowingly, we all use Scrum. For example, we do a retrospective on a regular basis on December 31, over a glass of champagne, when we reminisce about what was good that year and what we’d like during the next one. Scrum methodology can be used at home, in a teachers’ room, in a restaurant. Simply everywhere where a team of people is trying to achieve a goal. And although there were people from different backgrounds sitting in the audience at Profesia Days, I believe they understood this idea and that they took home some inspiration on how to work in a team a little more efficiently.
