Smoother development paths thanks to Scrum
(whitepaper in Dutch) - There is no one-size-fits-all approach to making a digital project a success. Every project, every customer and every system is unique. And that calls for a tailor-made approach.
Why Scrum?
Many of our projects require room for flexibility and progressive insight. With our customers and in our industry in particular, tomorrow can bring many new insights (and therefore look completely different). We want to be able to move fast and scrum helps us do that.
Traditional vs scrum
Scrum is a form of agile working. loosely translated, the agile philosophy means that when developing (software), the focus is on close cooperation between team members and the customer, delivering functional software and responding to change instead of following a fixed plan.
In this sense, agile is diametrically opposed to more traditional methods, where functionalities and requirements are defined in advance without accounting for time and space for unexpected changes. This is also referred to as the 'waterfall' method. And to be honest: for some projects, the waterfall method is still very suitable.
Everything you need to know about agile/scrum
In our whitepaper, we take you through the most important concepts, advantages and disadvantages of a scrum approach. And we share some of our experiences.
If we tackle a project using the scrum methodology, we do so with a small team of our specialists (design, UX, front end, back end, online marketing). One customer representative (the product owner) is a permanent part of this team. In fact, he is the captain of the ship.
Our customers get access to a complete team of specialists from us. That team is committed for a predetermined period of time and always delivers the agreed upon quality. Together with the client, we determine the direction (strategy, roadmap and product vision). The product owner determines, on a daily basis, the product backlog and the specific content of all user stories.
We work with short cycles (sprints). Often three days a week, in blocks of three weeks. The content is always determined shortly in advance. As a result, we are always able to be flexible and process new insights.
Show me results
Scrum requires a different mindset and letting go of habits. Accepting ambiguity is also crucial.
That is why we start every scrum project with a kick-off meeting where the whole team is present. Preferably we even train the product-owner to fully understand our working method. The result: we notice that projects progress faster and go live sooner.
The satisfaction of our customers also increases: they see that they are (quite literally) in control and that their budget is being spent in a predictable way.