According to Senior Consultant Nikki Clark, one of the reasons Scrum has become such a popular methodology is because it gives you the opportunity to make changes on the fly. You’re able to quickly move on to your next task without taking up too much time whenever there’s a change. In this Tech in 2, Nikki shares three tips for optimizing your Scrum team’s performance.
Advantages of Scrum
I really think that Scrum has become so popular because it gives you the opportunity to make changes on the fly. Whereas with Waterfall, we had to go through change management and it was a very long process. With Scrum, we can take a beat and work together and get our barriers figured out and then be able to move on to our next task without having to take so much time every time there’s a change.
Follow Methodology Closely
There are three tips that can help us optimize our Scrum team’s performance. For one, it’s important that we follow the methodology closely. If you start to substitute steps, then the process won’t go the way that it needs to. And it’s important that we follow the steps in order to be successful.
Add Extra Story Points to Avoid Interruptions
So there are always going to be issues or interruptions that come up. We have incidents, we have outages and it’s important to add a small amount of story points to each sprint in order to account for those. If we use up our entire sprint with our stories and then something comes up, we’re going to get behind.
Stay Focused
The third point is that it’s important that we don’t multitask too much in our sprints. It’s important that we focus on a few stories, add in story points for risks and incidences, but we don’t want our developers to get too overwhelmed, so it’s important that we focus. If we follow these steps to optimizing our Scrum team, then we’re going to have a team that is clicking, we’re going to have a team that is moving and we’re going to be able to address any obstacles that come up and we’re going to be able to deliver the product the way that our users need it.

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