Here at Applied information Sciences, we use Yammer quite a bit to facilitate quick, transparent and open communication. For such a distributed team of smart individuals, it’s an invaluable tool to building camaraderie and cohesiveness. Yammer allows us to discuss hot industry technologies and opens the channel to shared experiences and knowledge.

I recently used Yammer to conduct a poll here at AIS:

This question comes from the Scrum.org Open Assessment, a quick 30-question assessment provided by Scrum.org. The objective is to make available a quick gauge of Scrum knowledge. With personal results in hand, the Scrum Guide becomes a more valuable reference.

In the Scrum Guide you will find descriptions of Scrum events, roles, and artifacts. What you will not find is Scrum described as an Agile methodology or a project management process.

“We’re Agile, We Do Scrum”

I hear the statement “We’re Agile” bandied about as frequently as SOA, REST, and the Cloud. It seems to be a conversational prerequisite. The question I often ask is, how so? What about Scrum has made you Agile? More often than not I’m quite disappointed to hear examples of Scrum events and procedural edicts put in place to mimic the hype.

With all the marketing, evangelism, products and rhetoric, it’s important to recall the simple statements that started the Agile movement (now in its second decade):

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals & interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Even with the 12 principles behind the Agile Manifesto, these value statements can be printed on a single 8.5×11 piece of paper. Impressive that such a simple thing could drive multinational conglomerates to move mountains (and millions) in a quest to achieve this state of being.

So if Agile is not a set of guidelines or activities and Scrum is not a methodology…what is everyone so excited about? What is Scrum?!

Scrum Is the Means, Not the End

Scrum is intended to be “full of holes,” so to speak. It does not provide definitive answers to the tricky situations your team and organization will and do face. While every team encounters similar situations and can learn from one another, few practices can be taken as gospel.

Rather than patronize the world with a shallow, vague one-size-fits-all answer to complex situations, Scrum provides a simple framework composed of tight feedback loops in which intelligent teams can discover the most appropriate process for their context.

[pullquote]Scrum is meant to embed a long-term, sustainable learning mechanism into your organization.[/pullquote]

Standing on the legs of transparency, inspection and adaptation, Scrum is meant to embed a long-term, sustainable learning mechanism into your teams. Scrum asks that your team deliver “done” Software in 30 Days or less — a Sprint — and repeat the pattern until sufficient value is no longer being accrued. In doing so, a team can discover the true cost of simultaneously maintaining a backlog of features, delivering working software, and experimenting with the delivery process.

Scrum will help you create a momentum of delivery. Scrum is a framework within which you can achieve an Agile state of being.

Scrum at AIS

While the poll question may be a bit leading, I was incredibly happy to see that the results of the Yammer poll shows 91% of our team recognizes Scrum as a framework within which they can solve complex problems in smart, creative ways.  Something that our clients have come to expect from AIS.