Business Agility Requires Emergent Solutions

Throughout this book, we have explored an iterative and incremental approach to delivering value in a complex and uncertain world. To solve problems, ideally you will focus on a simple process: Try something, learn something, repeat. Build the solution in line with your growing collective understanding, responding to the changes as you see them coming.

Organizations want to enable business agility, not just to “do Scrum.” Business agility means a quick enough return on investment (ROI), flexibility and control over investment decisions, and the ability to easily change direction when new opportunities or risks arise. Iterative and incremental approaches, by themselves, don’t always achieve these valuable outcomes. The core of Scrum—an agile mindset, empiricism, and teamwork—provides the necessary foundation for realizing the benefits of this iterative and incremental approach.

By paying attention to feedback from the Scrum Team, the market, and stakeholders, organizations can reap valuable insights that help them continually improve their products and the processes being used to create those products. These feedback loops are driven by the three enablers of empiricism: transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Feedback, reinforced by the Scrum values, enables a learning culture that encourages experimentation and continuous improvement.

This learning culture permeates every aspect of how an organization delivers products, from early conversations around what could be a good idea (a hypothesis), to delivering each “Done” Increment. The organization continually refines both the product and its delivery approach as it pursues its vision for the product.

In Chapter 1, “Continuously Improving Your Scrum Practice,” we introduced seven key areas that support improvement: an agile mindset, empiricism, teamwork, team process, team identity, product value, and organization. Through the course of this book, we have expanded on each of these key areas, showing how to use them to help a Scrum Team to improve.

Along the way, we hope you have learned some important lessons:

• Without knowledgeable, skilled, and dedicated people, Scrum doesn’t work. Creating valuable solutions in a complex world requires teams composed of motivated people with many different kinds of knowledge, skills, and experiences. These teams need supportive space in which team members can collaborate to build creative solutions and learn from doing so.

• Teams need help from the organization. Teams live within organizations, and the culture of the organization will shape teams, either helping them expand or restricting their growth. When friction arises between a team and the organization, look for what is driving the conflict between who the team is and how the organization operates. Try to understand where and why there is a conflict between the agile values and principles and the behaviors exhibited in the organization.

• Mindset shapes culture, and culture informs process. Having a positive agile mindset will help shape the culture that facilitates maximizing the benefits of Scrum and being resilient in a complex and rapidly changing environment.

• Mastering Scrum is a journey, not a destination. Practice makes better, never perfect. The more you practice awareness (of yourself and those around you), reflect, and then act with intention, the better you will become at creatively and productively solving problems and delivering solutions of the highest possible value. Where you are going on this journey will certainly be changing as well, so stay open to the possibilities.

Regularly revisiting the assessment questions in Appendix A, “A Self-Assessment for Understanding Where You Are,” will help you to look for ways you and your teams can improve. Ask yourself:

• What are you learning?

• What has changed?

• What risks or opportunities are presenting themselves?

• Where do you see common themes?

• What trends do you notice?

In a similar way that individual skills improve, the Scrum Team and organization can improve by seeking active experiments to grow and learn, and by responding to insights and changes at an increasingly rapid pace. Teams and organizations improve by developing the following assets:

• A ruthless focus on value

• A relentless focus on technical excellence and getting to “Done”

• A spirit of continuous improvement, always seeking “better”

Acknowledge your present situation and look for that smallest next step that will bring you the most value in moving toward your goal. Change is hard, and using a framework will guide the change to be more focused, disciplined, and effective. Being clear about the framework you are using and using it as intended will provide the best benefits.

Call to Action

At the end of each chapter, we have issued a “call to action” intended to keep you moving forward on your ongoing journey to maximize the benefits of Scrum. Your journey doesn’t end here, at the end of this book; in fact, it is just beginning. Reflect on your key insights, the actions you have already taken, and the results you have observed from those actions. Focus first on building a strong team and on the fundamentals of empiricism, and then build from there based on feedback. With experience and practice, activities that were very hard at the beginning will become almost effortless.

Consider scheduling time on your calendar to regularly reflect on your learning, observations, and insights in your journey of Scrum mastery. As you do, consider how you will incorporate these learnings to better serve your Scrum Team and your organization (and perhaps beyond). Continually inspect your results and adapt your approach.

Scrum’s power derives from its simplicity. As the world becomes more volatile, uncertain, and ambiguous, you will need Scrum’s simplicity to navigate the world’s increasing complexity. Leaders who embrace simplicity and empiricism enable their people, teams, and organizations to thrive and, in turn, deliver better solutions to the world’s challenges. We encourage you to be part of the Scrum.org mission to improve the profession of product delivery. Let professionalism guide you.

We wish you the best on your own journey of learning and improvement.

Scrum on!