Seeing as Timmy, our technical director has become a Scrum Master I thought I would explain what value Scrum has added from a Partner and Creative Director’s perspective.
Note: At Or Media the design team were christened the ‘fluffies’ by the Dev team and likewise we call the Dev guys the imaginative group name ‘techies’ – so if I use these words you know who I am referring too!
Before Scrum was introduced we had a multitude of ways of managing the development, it’s process and tasks. It was mainly done by the Project Manager sitting with the Dev Team and running through spreadsheets and Gantt charts.
The Scrum methodology has improved the way the design team co-ordinate with the Dev team as we can feed through our creative and work alongside them as they work through the tasks on their sprints. The Design team tend to work in advance of the Dev team but we are often preparing graphics at the same time so breaking the development process into the sprints have helped us co-ordinate the workflow, meaning that we can quickly build prototypes for client review as both teams are working on the same areas.
The Sprints have helped as the fluffies can start checking over the front-end and make adjustments way before project completion. Leaving too much to the end has in the past compromised delivery dates so this has really helped… you know how fussy us ‘fluffies’ can be, everything has to be pixel perfect!
The fluffies certainly don’t attend the ‘techies’ daily scrum, but the Sprint Boards help us see what tasks they are working on and what they are up to.
As one of the partner’s here I tend to also be a Project Owner on some of the projects so keeping up to date with the backlogs and working out what the next sprint will achieve is easily co-ordinated between the Project Managers, the Development and Design Teams… I tend not to get too involved with the Reviews and Retrospectives unless something has hit the fan or things are running over – as the PO of the project we are the Single Wringable Neck so we need to be clear if problems have arisen - Scrum has helped get to those problems quickly and make aware any possible issues and resolving them sooner, all the time keeping the main project stakeholder (the client) in the loop as early as possible.
So overall, the practice of Scrum, even in a small agency like ours has greatly improved the deliverables, we are only now starting to see efficiency improvements, I think the best project to date for us has been the Channel 4 Sales website as this was a 5-month development process which in our world is a lifetime!
We will never attain a methodology like Scrum in the fluffies world but we have adopted the daily scrum meetings albeit sitting down; although we tend to natter more and talk about nice websites we have seen or Lisa’s new socks before we’ve even discussed what we need to do that day!
