Make Your Business Cost-Efficient with SCRUM Methodology

First, let us understand what Scrum is.

Scrum is a project management approach used primarily for product development, where cross-functional team members work collaboratively in a time-boxed manner, allowing the business to change scope till the planning stage, and create incremental output that can be demonstrated.

Although Scrum was created for software development, many other fields have found it to be useful for managing knowledge based projects. Fields such as education, marketing, research, and others use Scrum effectively.

What Scrum allows you to do is to create a small, potentially shippable product increment at the end of every Sprint.

A Sprint is typically of 3-4 weeks duration, and acts as a mini-project. 

Sprint planning is done at the beginning by fixing the scope of work, followed by design, development, testing, and deployment. This approach is called time-boxing. 

Scrum itself does not create the product faster, and thus cheaper, though.

What it does is allow you to,

• Build a quality product adaptively
• Change requirements if business side demands
• Pivot the product if early adapters tell you that market doesn’t want it

Scrum is an approach, and its effectiveness is determined by how best it is executed.

You could be following every single ceremony, role, artifact, and best practice there is and still not produce the product required by the market, if the team members do not own the product development effort and work collaboratively.

And, Scrum being a simple approach, can be misused easily if the senior management (and all related stakeholders) do not exhibit the Agile mindset.

Finally, it is not possible to prove that Scrum is cheaper than other project management approaches.

Why?

Because no two projects are the same, each one is completely unique. 

People and their backgrounds are different, market conditions, customer expectations, product characteristics, and technology aspects – are all different. 

Running two projects using different approaches and having the same yardstick to measure pace and cost savings is not feasible.

Thus, claiming that Scrum based projects are cheaper is a myth.

Having claimed this, there IS a way to increase business cost efficiency.

Adapt a slightly different perspective.

That is, to keep a laser focus on the Scrum principles and create practices that reduce any unnecessary costs – thereby making the Scrum development more economical.

Now that we’ve set the perspective right, let us look at some of the ways to increase the business cost efficiency of Scrum projects.

Figure 1: Keep business costs down by focusing on increasing efficiency and quality 

Business cost is any cost that’s associated with creating the product and getting it to the hands of the customer. You can keep the costs down by being diligent about Scrum practices and aligning them as closely as possible to the principles.

Let us take a look at some of these.

Scrum is Simple

• Planning is simple
• The Concept of Sprint is simple
• Daily Standup calls are simple
• Review & Retrospective are simple
• Inspect & Adapt principle is simple

This means that you do not overdo it. Stop when you’ve got the result.

Save on over-engineering, over-implementation, and over-testing. Stay with ‘just enough.’

Rapid Delivery

Scrum uses Sprint – a time-boxed approach to fix scope and deliver the output.

This gives the end user a demonstrable product increment every few weeks.

Do this right, involve end users and other stakeholders during retrospectives, and you get to HEAR what the market has to say.

Whether your product is needed or not.

This opportunity to take feedback on incremental product saves you tons of time and cost, should you use another project management approach that gives the product only at the end, and you get to realize that the market did not want the product.

That’s the business cost efficiency that Scrum lets you build.

Eliminate Waste

One of the Scrum principles is “working software over comprehensive documentation.”

Let us assume you used a traditional project management approach to develop the product. As per that, you’ll spend a phase spanning a few months capturing and documenting all the requirements.

That is the cost. But you don’t yet realize the corresponding value.

What if some requirements change (and they do!) after a few months into development?

You bring Change Management into the picture.

That means you throw some portion (if you’re lucky) of the documented requirements and corresponding design, development, and testing effort into the wastebasket.

This can never happen with the Scrum approach.

That’s the business cost saving you’ll have with Scrum. And you can have it only if you diligently follow the ‘inspect and adapt’ practices at every stage.

“Where”, did you ask?

Well, the ‘inspect and adapt’ exercise happens during, 

• Daily standup meeting (when members talk about their work)
• Product review meeting (for product increment)
• Retrospective meeting (for the process)

Accountability & Commitment by the Stakeholders

This is a big one too.

An accountable and committed team can make the impossible, possible.

The team is committed to each other and to increasing the creation of business value by collaborating and continuously improving the process with an inspect and adapt approach.

The team itself plans the scope of the Sprint during the Sprint planning. But this does not mean they must complete all of the scope. The team does its best to complete as much of the scope as possible, and they are accountable for  what they have been able to implement.

Now, that’s the expectation from the Scrum team, and it is your (as their servant leader) responsibility to ensure no stakeholder puts pressure on the team to commit to a certain amount of scope and insists that they complete it.

If that happens, then the team is put into a pressure situation, wherein they are bound to make mistakes, which will have a ripple effect – causing the quality to go down and the cost of fixing defects and additional testing to increase.

Bottom line: Trust the team members to understand what they are accountable for and committed to, and let them do their job without facing any impediments. And you’ll be able to keep the business costs down!

Focus on Business Value

The only focus of the Scrum team is to create business value in every single Sprint. It produces what is required.

The team works closely with the Product Owner, who gives requirements, clarifies questions during planning, and is available for any questions during the development.

This reduces the possibility of Gold plating or Scope Creep, which adds cost.

Digressing a wee bit here, 

• Gold plating is the scenario where a developer adds functionality that was not scoped in the Sprint, with a hope to delight the customer.
• Scope Creep is the scenario where a customer interferes with the team’s planned schedule, asking for a seemingly small change, which snowballs into a big change due to dependencies (or added complexity introduced due to lack of time).

By strictly following the practice of working closely with the Product Owner, these two cost-inducing scenarios can be avoided.

That’s a cost-saving you can’t even estimate on a project.

Continuous Improvement

Product review and Retrospective are two practices the Scrum team does at the end of the Sprint. The review gives them feedback about the product increment, and the retrospective gives feedback about their process. 

Apart from these two inspect and adapt instances, the daily standup meeting also gives them a chance to have continuous feedback.

This helps them improve consistently, and this is typically witnessed as increased velocity Sprint after Sprint.

As the team gets efficient, the wastage of time & resources comes down, and the quality of their decisions (architecture, design, implementation, and testing approach) goes up. And all of this increases business cost efficiency.