The Framework That Changes Everything

Scrum changes the way everyone in your company interacts and will likely influence your organizational structure.

When an organization considers “moving to” Scrum, it’s easy to think that Scrum is a new process that just needs to be learned and implemented.

People say, “we need to do Scrum”, with the expectation to be faster and more competitive. This expectation can lead some to mistake Scrum as being prescriptive, but it’s only prescriptive to the extent that you discover your own way of getting work done.

The goal of Scrum is to be the lightest-possible framework to guide you in discovering and creating your own process! It is a guide that allows you to discover the best approaches through constant inspection and adaptation.

This means Scrum isn’t a process. It is a framework or a metaprocess allowing it to be used in most any environment.

What is the idea of a metaprocess? Simply defined it is “a process to develop a process”.

Scrum as the metaprocess teaches an approach that helps you learn more quickly and guides you to constantly inspect and adapt not only your product but your process as well.

It changes the way everyone in your company interacts and will likely influence your organizational structure. When it comes to doing your actual work (which may be software, hardware, research or any complex work), Scrum is silent on “how” to do that work.

It does not describe the process for building or creating anything.

It does not tell you whether you should use tools or which ones.

It does not tell you how to best do software.

It does not talk about coding languages, tools, metrics, architecture, object paradigms, whether to do code reviews or how to do testing.

We believe that you know the most about your discipline and the various options and constraints in your environment. Scrum trainers will give you ideas and pointers, but the way you choose to get your work done is up to you!

You are in the best place to come up with the processes, techniques, and tools to use (you can check out scrumplop.org for ideas!)

Scrum calls you to use the practices of prioritization, have 3 empowered roles (ScrumMaster, Product Owner, and Dev team), use timeboxes, have certain meetings, and always create a valuable product increment in each sprint.

The use of this meta-process, or framework, is what allows Scrum to be successful in almost any environment. It gives you some structure but allows you to design your own process to fit your organization’s needs.

Overall, Scrum helps you focus on the right things and to find better and better ways to create value.