Why Certain Businesses Fail To Benefit From Scrum – Part 1

Scrum may be difficult to understand and follow

Despite the fact that scrum framework helps to provide solutions for the drawbacks prevailing in traditional project management methodologies, in many cases, the company implementing scrum for the first time may face certain issues associated with scrum itself. Scrum methodology is highly adaptable and powerful. It can cater to changing market conditions, and successfully incorporate the changes within the product development cycle, even while the product is currently being developed. There are several advantages, which makes Agile scrum a much desired development methodology. However, implementing scrum in a successful manner can prove to be very challenging for first timers. The impediments faced are generally related to the transition process, as the company starts migrating from its current development methodology to scrum. For majority of people new to scrum, the environment may appear to be complex, rigid, and difficult to understand and follow. This is a misconception since scrum can be almost everything but not rigid in the truest sense. In the initial stage, the team may find it difficult to understand how scrum works, and what kind of roles the product owner and scrum master play while implementing scrum. In addition, there are certain artifacts or objects such as the product backlog and the sprint backlog which figure prominently in scrum. Moreover, scrum events such as the daily sprint meeting, sprint planning meeting, sprint retrospective meeting, and the sprint review meeting may confuse novices why they exist, or are needed in the first place. Scrum can be quite different when compared to traditional waterfall project development methods, and people often start developing a negative attitude towards it simply because they fail to understand it.   

Not getting the desired results out of scrum implementation

A company or a business may decide to implement scrum to reduce the project turnaround time or increase the productivity and the ROI. There is always a reason why an ongoing process flow may be required to be replaced by a new one by the business owners. The management and stakeholders may have “heard” about the obvious benefits of using scrum, and how their business can possibly benefit from them. The management personnel may have high expectations, and might even plan their marketing goals and objective keeping in mind the benefits availed by implementing scrum in their ongoing projects. However, in many cases, due to various reasons scrum implementation may fail to produce the desired results for the particular business, and the entire project may go askew with no clear indication as to in which direction it is heading for. The reasons may be many and varied. It is important to know what they are if scrum is to be implemented successfully.  

•  Improper communication channels and feedback

Broken feedback channels and improper communication processes primarily lead to a void in the learning process which is so very important while implementing scrum. A major issue is the lack of feedback availed during the scrum meetings and important information not being transmitted to the team members in the correct manner, or at the correct time.Read more on https://scrumtool.blog.com/2014/04/03/why-certain-businesses-fail-to-benefit-from-scrum-%E2%80%93-part-1/

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