Let’s Solve Scrum!

By Nicole Lipa

“Let’s Solve Scrum!” was about introducing and diving into scrum. Kristina Macro, a Project Manager at Xylem, a water services company, gave the presentation. She utilizes scrum as a way to manage her team and their goals. Scrum is an agile project management framework that uses an agile manifesto. It is a set of roles, meetings, and processes to help the company adapt to changing conditions. There are three fundamental principles: first, transparency; second, inspection; third, adaptation. Kristina made sure to emphasize that scrum is not necessarily a one-size-fits-all strategy: it will change based on the needs of the specific company and team running it. For example, the team size depends on what the current project is, and the definition of “ready” to begin will change as well. Being “ready” is defined as what context the team has: relevant documents and background on the client, the acceptance criteria (clearly defined stopping point and expectations), and having the task described, potential approvals needed, priorities mapped out, and who to reach out to for help are all helpful to have laid out. To begin scrum, important questions to ask are: “What should we start doing?”, “What should we stop doing?”, and “What should we keep doing?”. Sprints are also an important part of the scrum framework. They give the team motivation to work on something new, and the ability to phase out the old work as well. Kristina ended her talk by discussing lessons she has learned through scrum so far: scrum won’t solve resource constraints, refining backlog takes a lot of effort, and following the plan versus being flexible. Her top recommendations were planning, having standups, being retrospective, and reviewing. Overall, this session was a great addition to the WeLocal lineup, and I learned a lot about this great project management tool!