Delivering IT Projects

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Certified ScrumMaster

Posted by Cathryn in : Miscellaneous, Project Management , trackback

I spent six months this year as Project Manager for a major website upgrade, working with a team of developers and web staff using the Agile methodology, Scrum. For a fairly traditional project manager, this was something of an eye-opener. A very able, empowered team who are used to working together to deliver high quality work is a dream situation for any project manager, and I became intrigued about the method helped them achieve this.

As ScrumMaster, I found myself calling on facilitation skills and soon realised that knowing when to keep out of it and let the team get on with their jobs was as important as trying to lead. Of course, like most projects, there were areas outside the development team that still needed project management, so there was still plenty of work to do.

When I moved on to the next project at the same client, they were not using Agile, and were keen to see more traditional project management, but I found it useful to incorporate some of the Scrum ideas into the new project, particularly the short daily standup meeting and the idea of fairly short iterations with detailed scope defined at the beginning of each cycle. These are by no means new ideas, or unique to Agile / Scrum, but having the ‘big picture’ of the methodology in the back of my mind gave me the impetus to use them consistently.

So, having read the book and put it into practice it was time to make sure I had theory well understood and to get the certification. A two-day course with the very experienced and able Martine Devos taught the detail of estimation techniques and immersed me in the philosophy behind it all, as well as giving me the stamp of approval from the Scrum Alliance.

At the start of a new project, I work out how to manage it based on the client’s requirements, the nature (size, complexity, type) of the project, the experience and practices of team members already in place, the needs of any major external suppliers if relevant, my own practices and industry standard methods. Thinking back over projects I’ve run in recent years, most of them would have benefited from at least some aspects of Scrum, and I expect that will be true in the future.

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