Last updated on October 13th, 2022 at 06:51 am
This is not a frequent question that many encounters in their Agile career, but, have you ever wondered, ‘Is Agile possible without Scrum?’
The answer to that is, yes, absolutely.
There are many instances of real-world projects and corporate projects that sometimes do not make use of any of your Scrum sensibilities. Knowing and being an Agile practitioner is more than sufficient. Let us understand further. Scrum as a framework is used to enable teams, enterprises, and organizations on their Agility pathway. It is not the only proven way to be Agile. But Agile works well without Scrum under certain circumstances only. Let us understand what these are -
1. When your project is small in size - Agile without Scrum works best only if the project size is small and the team members are also small in number. This is because the time used for Agile scaling will be shorter and will have not many disadvantages affecting the project directly.
2. Clear, simple and direct requirements - Under Agile without Scrum is applicable best to requirements from the project that are really simple, crystal clear and direct.
3. Periodical planning and requirements - The projects that you undertake must have and experience periodical planning and must be upgraded with periodical requirements, so as to not pressure the project processes. This can be used to a large extent with Agile and there is no requirement for Scrum, whatsoever.
4. Regular improvements - open communication with your team members which is quite easy to do since it is already a small team, can help you figure out already existing solutions and gain feedback regarding your work, weekly developments and progress, crosscheck these with the developer, and before you know it, you would have increased your efficiency through such regular improvements.
5. Small teams mean no hierarchies/better transparency - Small teams where everybody is an equal leads to transparent knowledge sharing, coping strategies and mutual help/support. Also since smaller teams lack a head, or rather is not hierarchy conducive, it becomes easier to be a self-organizing team which is driven by equal participation from the team members.
6. Quality output - All team members are equally held responsible for their contribution and quality output, which is responsible to keep the team going. This helps deliver success and efficient output in small scale but the quality remains very high. Each and every member ensures that their work meets a standard parameter to test quality.
7. Regular/periodical releases - It is most important to have working software in place instead of comprehensive documentation.
Sometimes you will have no release team and may have to work around this aspect of the project by yourselves. You will need to put your work into production periodically, ideally, weekly, and get the approval of the Product Manager to ensure you can move on smoothly to the next tasks at hand. You may also need to segregate tasks and assign them according to each team member’s unique capacities, to see quality output from your team’s final project work. There is an excellent way to learn Agile and go under Agile training. You can try Agile training in Mumbai. You can eventually upgrade to Agile development certification.
