When many of us hear the term, Scrum in an Agile environment, the knee jerk reaction is, “oh, that does not apply to me because that process works for technical development teams”. Well, friends, that assumption is not the case at all. Below, I will outline a recent experience in which Scrum was used to solve real world organizational problems in a non-technical environment .
Think about the problem to solve. And, as a team, spend a few minutes (5-ish) to come up with words that relate to the solution.
Once the team is in agreement, the next step would be to categorize the words in clusters of similarity.
Next, the team will take these clusters and develop objectives for each grouping of clusters.
Note: When this is done by multiple teams, there should be an obvious consistency of goals.
Visibly post these objectives, arrange the clusters and discuss priority. Typically, three to four items will be the active achievable goals of the next sprint.
This recent experience included like minded professionals aiming to develop solutions for a recurring community event.
Note: There were three participating teams at the exclusive event adding value to this highly interactive exercise.
In the beginning of this interactive event, my group (one of three) focused on words of improvement such as communication, marketing, membership and transparency. As you can imagine, all of these words collide with one another and we were able to be move the process forward with the following objectives.
“Create a newsletter to share information with members, present, and not-present, about past and upcoming events and topics”
“Recruit new members to the group who are part of the local Agile community”
“Video capture the presentations for non-attendees and for the reference of attendees”.
This process was highly effective in displaying to leadership the needs and wants of the attendees. All three teams participating came to a consensus and we are moving forward. A process such of this can be applied to many non-technical teams, for-profit, non-profit, community organizations, or even at your own home.
Give Scrum a chance, you don’t need to be a developer to be Agile, for goodness sakes, I have a whiteboard in my kitchen!!