Scrum helps to lower the project's risks, bring happiness to customers and improve team collaboration.
One of the greatest things when applying Scrum is that it can be applied without even knowing that it has been applied in a project and still have all the nice outcomes that Scrum could bring into a project.
Below is a use case of Scrum in a six-months project that my Team and I have delivered to one of the largest banks in China.
Use Case
We have being working with the bank to draft and define precise requirements for a new hedging fund system for 2 weeks, however the requirement documentation was still very vague that we cannot estimate the man-days required to deliver the project. Nevertheless, the customer asked us to sign a contract that bounded us to agree on delivering a system as described in the requirement documentation. After a few days of negotiation, the customer agreed that they would play "fair" to us because they knew that the requirement documentation was not up to the point that a vendor could develop a system out of it. We took the risk by signing the contract with the guesstimated man-days and launched our quest to this mysterious land.
I was leading a team of 3 to deliver the system. I began by using the traditional waterfall development process to guide the other 2 team members to deliver the well-defined component of the system. After the evaluation of the scope of the component, I expected that it could be delivered in 2 weeks. With the support of my team, we achieved the first goal of the project before the Christmas time. Customer and we were very happy about the outcome but the challenge didn't start to crop up until the next stage.
The second stage of the project was chaotic. We continued to apply the waterfall development process during the beginning of the second stage of the project but we soon found out that it wasn't appropriated. This was due to the fact that the requirement was so vague that we couldn't proceed any further. I started to call for requirement meetings with the customer and told them that we needed to collect more requirements before we could proceed. However, the customer was not clear about what they wanted also since they were not the end-user of the system. I immediately knew that problems were coming and I turned to my manager to ask for his advice. My manager really wanted to bring the customer to the house, so he asked the team to try their best to help the customer to succeed. This was the turning point of the project. I knew the fact that we were not going to deliver the right system in the first attempt, therefore I had to deliver it in batches and adapt the system overtime during the remaining period of the project. Luckily, we were working onsite and therefore we had direct access to the customer and the end-user to collect user requirements. This was when I started to think about using Scrum for the second stage of the project.
Applying Scrum is straightforward if the team members already know about the philosophy, the roles and the practices of Scrum. However, my team members had no past experience on Scrum. Therefore, I had to tweak the game just enough to get it going. I started to change my way of leading the project. I wrote the product backlog for the project and prioritized the user story in the backlog. Also, instead of managing the project like before, I started to hold daily meeting with them to discuss about obstacles they were facing when designing the system. Casually, in a daily basis, I would inquire them about what they did yesterday and what they were planning to do in the next few days. It was just very natural for senior engineers to have a clear picture of what they were working on and what was next things to do so my conversation with them didn't annoy them too much. However, the team members expressed that they were quite uncomfortable of this project because they didn't know if the project would ever end. I told them we would going to have bi-weekly meeting with the end-user until the end of the project in order to make sure that the system we developed was what the end-user wanted. However, this required us to prepare for demo every 2 weeks. They agreed on it and we proceeded. It was true that for the first few bi-weekly meetings, the end-users made a lot of changes in their requirement documentation. But after they saw the system 2-3 times, they started to know what were MUST in their system and what were just NICE-TO-HAVE. I negotiated with the customer saying that if our common goal was to deliver the project on-time we needed to focus on items that were MUST have. Since the customer knew that the NICE-TO-HAVE functionality could be developed by themselves after the foundation was completed, they agreed to take the risk.
The Scrum-behind-the-scene continued until the end of the project. The backlog was updated and prioritized everyday to reflect the changes. We continued the 2 weeks development iteration and bi-weekly meeting until the end of the agreed duration of the contract. The system was delivered on-time and the customer was very happy with it.
For the past 2 months, the system was working day and night to process over 200000 jobs for their pricing and hedging computations and no single bug was found for the past 2 months. The benefits for the company and the customer are clear but the most important thing is that the team is proud of their work. The efficiency and productivity of the team have been improved after the project and we get to know better each other after the intense collaboration that was required in the project.
Thanks to Scrum, It brings order from chaos.
