The essence of Scrum is to ensure progress. The formal elements of the framework –the restrospective, reviews, daily standup, etc.– are not ends in themselves but ways to ensure that progress happens.
It may seem simplistic to reduce Scrum to the mere fact of ensuring progress, but ensuring progress is not that easy, and Scrum is an effective tool to do it.
To prove this point, just think of what the opposite of progress means: to be stuck. A project can stuck for many reasons. Some symptoms include:
- Work is half done or needs to be redone
- Work is unclear and time is spent discussing it rather than doing it
- Work wasn’t needed (people work on the wrong stuff)
- Work can’t be done (because of dependencies, knowledge, etc.)
When a project is stucked, people work, but the overall project doesn’t move forward. The time is wasted.
Scrum prevent waisting time by maintaining a constant pressure on delivery and keeping the amount of work in progress low (“start finishing and stop starting”). It doesn’t matter how small the work item is. Actually the smaller the better, since it favors focus and quality.
Scrum is a framework for micromanagement, but without a micromanager. The team micromanages itself (i.e. “self-organisation”) and decides itself of the tasks to perform. Taskification happens mostly during the Scrum planning but then throughout the entire Sprint as the team actualises and refines the tasks to be done. And then does them.
The goal is to move forward, to overcome difficulties, to get concrete results, to make progress. For this you want the whole team to engage and people to help each other. You want your team to be more than the sum of its individuals.
I want teams emerging from the daily standup saying things like, “Let’s nail this. Let’s do this.” — The Origins of the Daily Standup, Jeff Sutherland
People want to make progress fast, but software development is so complex that the risk is not to make progress too slowly but no progress at all. As long as you can ensure that some progress happens and you’re not compromising quality, you’re on a good track.
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