“the first engineering company in Italy
to adopt Scrum”
Scrum is the most-used agile method in the world today: an iterative and incremental Agile Framework, devised to develop complex projects, presented by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland in 1995.
It organises work in self-organised, cross-functional teams, i.e. with all the skills necessary to achieve the aim. A member of the Scrum team, called Product Owner, is concerned with understanding what has to be done, deciding the priorities and maximising the value of the result, and visualising them in a visible, clear and ordered list (called Product Backlog). The other team members, called Developers, have to decide how to create the product organising themselves. Lastly, one member, called Scrum Master, is delegated to overseeing the process – improving productivity and removing obstacles, i.e. all that slows or impedes achieving the aim. Work is planned in work cycles called Sprints that last for a maximum of one month (often two weeks). At the end of this, there is a revision with the stakeholders, i.e. those with an interest in what has been produced (customers, users, colleagues, managers, etc.) to collect feedback. Immediately afterwards, the team reflects on what to improve in an event called a Retrospective, agrees practical action to implement and so starts again with a new Sprint. In this way, the Scrum team is self-organised deciding autonomously how to implement the work, solve problems and continuously improve.