Agile Scrum at Lagant

Agile Scrum is a flexible and iterative agile practice designed to help teams efficiently and effectively handle complex challenges. It provides a framework for developing, delivering and maintaining products in a collaborative and adaptive manner. This approach has gained a lot of popularity in software development in recent years and is now also being successfully applied to HR and marketing departments. Through transparency and the process of inspection and adaptation, continuous improvement is made on an empirical basis.

Agile Scrum offers several benefits to organizations that strive for faster and more flexible product delivery. Some key benefits are:

• Increased customer satisfaction: Agile Scrum enables teams to quickly deliver valuable products, allowing customer feedback to be incorporated early in the development process. As a result, the end result better meets the wishes and needs of the customer.
• Improved product quality: Due to the focus on iterative development and frequent feedback loops, teams learn faster. Agile Scrum helps identify and solve problems at an early stage. This leads to higher product quality and minimizes the risk of errors and shortcomings.
• Flexibility and adaptability: Agile Scrum encourages teams to be flexible and adapt to changing circumstances, customer needs, technologies and priorities. It offers a structured approach to continuous learning and improvement.  
• More support and understanding and better communication: With Agile Scrum, multidisciplinary teams work closely together and communicate regularly. This promotes a shared understanding of the product vision and ensures better collaboration between team members. Jeff Sutherland, inventor of the Scrum method, says: “Shared documents is not the same as shared understanding”. “Shared understanding” enables teams to become more effective and to grow into high performing teams.

It is important to know that within Scrum responsibilities are divided among different roles. However, success depends on cooperation and communication between all parties involved. It is a team effort where each role makes an essential contribution to achieving the project goals. 

The main roles are:

• Product Owner: The Product Owner is responsible for the product vision and defining and prioritizing the product requirements. This represents the interests of the stakeholders and ensures that the development team works on the most valuable features and functionalities. The Product Owner is involved in creating the Product Backlog and works closely with the team to provide a clear vision and direction.
• Scrum Master: The Scrum Master is responsible for facilitating the Scrum process and ensuring the correct application of the Scrum principles. Scrum Masters guide teams in understanding and following the Scrum methodology and help remove obstacles that may hinder the team. The Scrum Master is a coach and facilitator, who ensures that the team can work effectively and improve.
• Development team: The development team consists of professionals with different skills and expertise (multidisciplinary) who work together to develop and deliver the product. The team is self-organizing and autonomous, and they are responsible for planning, executing and delivering the tasks within each sprint. The development team works together with the Product Owner to understand the user stories and with the Scrum Master to solve obstacles.

Scrum uses various ceremonies to monitor the progress of product development and promote collaboration within the team. Important ceremonies are:

• Sprint Planning: During the Sprint Planning, the team determines which tasks must be performed in the upcoming sprint. The Product Owner explains the customer wishes, requirements and priorities, while the team estimates the scope of the tasks and user stories and decides which ones are feasible within the sprint.
• Daily Scrum: The Daily Scrum is a short daily meeting where team members share their progress, discuss any obstacles and align to the daily goal. It promotes transparency and helps identify any bottlenecks that need to be resolved.
• Sprint Reviews: At the end of each sprint, a Sprint Review takes place, in which the team demonstrates the completed tasks to the stakeholders (many people also call this the Demo). This provides the opportunity for feedback and validation, and allows the team to further improve the product based on input received. Here the principles of transparency, inspection and adaptation are applied.
• Sprint Retrospective: The Sprint Retrospective is a meeting at the end of each sprint in which the team reflects on the process of collaborating and identifies what went well and what could be improved. The goal is to promote continuous learning and improvement so that future sprints can be performed more efficiently and with pleasure.