Author: Lorraine Pauls Longhurst Published: CIO Magazine, Essential Technology Date: April 2009
Why Agile makes sense for organisations during a global downturn; based on interviews with Jon Scumniotales, the first dedicated Scrum Master and David Norton, Gartner Group Analyst.
Scumniotales outlines the key benefits of Agile development as: "Better met customer expectations, higher quality products, on-time delivery and more predictable project execution." These benefits can be gained not only by organisations that are developing sofrware, but also organisations managing other types of software-related projects.
The days of two-year software implementation projects delivering an outdated, irrelevant product are no longer feasible, as IT dollars are being stretched further than ever in this challenging economic climate. Enter Scrum, a software development process most commonly associated with Agile software development projects. The name "Scrum" derives from how the different phases of a project overlap, with the entire process handled by a cross-functional team across the different phases, similar to a game of rugby, where the whole team acts as a unit, passing the ball back and forth. Scrum enables companies to see tangible results from software development projects very early on, and deliver value to the business even as requirements change and cutbacks loom - characteristics that are highly valued in this sagging economy.
Often described as "a process skeleton", Scrum methodology breaks development work into "sprints" (two-week chunks) and the team then works together to determine which "user stories" (requirements) from the "product backlog" make it into each sprint. Scrum also includes a set of predefined roles, which include the Scrum Master, who maintains the processes and acts like a project manager, the Product Owner who represents the stakeholders, and the Team which includes the developers.
John Scumniotales, currently the vice president of research and development and application lifecycle management (ALM) products at Serena Software, was the first dedicated Scrum Master back in the mid 90s. Scumniotales worked on the Smalltalk IDE product at Easel Corporation, where Scrum was incubated under Jeff Sutherland, along with assistance from Ken Schwaber.
Scumniotales believes the benefits of Scrum are particularly compelling when a company is fighting for its viability in a market downturn. "Scrum tends to be focused on how we compose the work, how we move work into the team, how the team is organised and how they communicate," he says.
Scumniotales outlines the key benefits of Agile development as: "Better met customer expectations, higher quality products, on-time delivery and more predictable project execution." These benefits can be gained not only by organisations that are developing sofrware, but also organisations managing other types of software-related projects.
"You think of Scrum as a way to handle how vour team is working together, how you're organising requirements, and how you're doing project management," Scumniotales says. "You can apply that to basically any kind of work that you need to break down."
According to Scumniotales, organisations are using Scrum for projects as disparate as integrating packaged software with existing systems to helpdesk applications.
"Scrum is applicable across any kind of project work; it will improve the communication of the team, and it will improve expectations being met from a customer perspective," he says.
Cancelling Projects
Most software-related projects use the "waterfall" approach to software development, where each phase does not start until the previous phase is complete - for example, design before development before testing.
According to David Norton, an analyst from Gartner Group, during a financial crisis "organisations will rush to put projects on hold or stop them, cut budgets and resources or look for lower cost resources". In tough times, the waterfall approach is much riskier for organisations that decide to cancel projects. "'With long delivery and maintenance cycles, you are gambling with the business' money on a single throw of the dice," Norton says.
"Because a solution is not delivered using the waterfall approach until the very end of the project, it comes down to simple probability," he says. "The longer a project takes to deliver, the longer it is exposed to risks - budget, resources, technology, organisation and external."
How can utilising Scrum or Agile methodologies help your organisation be successful during a financial crisis?
"In budgetary and/or resource constrained times, you may have to make a decision to end a project sooner, but [using] the traditional approach if you kill the project early, you get no value," Scumniotales says.
During a financial crisis, companies can derive comfort from using the traditional waterfall approach for a software project. Scumniotales refers to this comfort zone as "the power of the Gantt chart"."You can take it to a customer and they believe it," he says. "For the next 18 months here is what everyone is going to be working on, and here is the cost profile, etc."
But as a CIO during a financial crisis, should you be comforted by the Gantt chart?
The only way that the timeframe - and cost – outlined in the plan or Gantt chart can be met is if the scope and the resources remain constant.
As Scumniotales says, "the understanding of those requirements actually evolves as you build the system", and it is impossible to clearly define the detailed scope up-front that won't change." The probability that projects will be cancelled or adversely affected by staff reductions is heightened given the current uncertainty" says Gartner's Norton.
If requirements are changing and resources are being cut, the project scope must become more flexible, and that is where Scrum and Agile methods hit the mark. It's reassuring for a CIO to know that in these turbulent times a software project can deliver value to the business, regardless of whether it changes throughout or even finishes.
Scrum methodology is focussed on the importance of delivering value at various points within the project, rather than all at the end. "In situations where demand exceeds capacity, Scrum forces you to prioritise, so that at the end of each sprint or iteration, the highest priority features are available for release," Scumniotales says.
"The product owner owns the decision of moving things into a sprint, so you are forced to make that hard call of what we can and can't achieve."
Incremental Value
Projects managed using Scrum are better able to deliver value incrementally. The idea is that you put a system into production as fast as you can and get some kind of value, then add features in business priority order. If a project is put on hold, if it used Agile methods, it can still deliver value.
Scumniotales gives an example of how Scrum can be used for a project where a company is integrating packaged software with their current systems. "When you deliver components of the integration, they are all usable components for the end user," he says. "'We are not talking about an 18-month integration project where at the end you turn over the system. Now you are incrementally delivering value to the customer."
Scrum also provides value early. David Norton from Gartner says that "with continuous delivery cycles if the project is cancelled or stopped, it will have delivered some value to the business”. By giving the team the authority to work through the product backlog and demonstrate a releasable solution at various points throughout the project, the project will deliver high value up-front.
“The principle of 80 percent of the value in 20 percent of the features of the project is geared to giving high value in the initial iterations,” Norton says.
Cutting Budgets and Resources
According to Scumniotales, another reason to move to Scrum or Agile development is that “during an economic downturn, there will be some organisational changes and churn, so it’s a good time to take the opportunity to re-structure from a process perspective”.
Part of re-structuring the process involves getting the team to work together in a different way. The various roles must be set up on the team including the Product Owner (who has the authority and knowledge to represent all the stakeholders), the Scrum Master (who guides the process by which the work is performed) and the team members (who are committed to doing the work to deliver value to the stakeholders).
When resources are cut part of the way through a project, yet the timelines remain the same, then either quality or scope will suffer. However, Agile methods can enable an organisation to reduce scope in a logical manner. “Get the system into production, get some kind of value for the user as quickly as possible and then start incrementally adding value in business priority order,” Scumniotales advises.
Scrum methodology also encourages the team to jointly decide which items from the product backlog they have time to develop. The team must be a self-organising and self-managing team, one that will work closely to determine what is achievable within each sprint, given the limited resources.
"Pull those users in initially to make sure they have skin in the game. . . they cannot just point back to the IT team," Scumniotales says, referring to the amount of involvement the team members must have in prioritising the requirements.
As requirements are further defined throughout the project, the team must prioritise the requirements based on the limited time and resources. "One of the things that we have allowed ourselves to believe is that you can understand all of the requirements up-front and that you can translate those into a design that is implementable up-front," Scumniotales says.
Instead, the team must review the updated, prioritised requirements together at the beginning of each sprint and jointly decide which ones are do-able within the timeframe.
It can be difficult to use Scrum with an outside consulting company due to the need for flexible scope, yet fixed cost. David Wong, a solutions manager with Bright Blue Consulting, says one of the keys to implementing Agile methodology is that "there must be trust involved – that is, the client must trust the consulting company, and both parties must work as a team to refine the project scope".
"There must also be acceptance by the client that not all requirements will make it into the final release, and the client must be able to prioritise requirements," Wong says. "To facilitate this, upper management must delegate authority to the relevant process owners to prioritise the requirements."
