What is Agile Scrum Anyway?

I’ve lived long enough to know I probably shouldn’t ask most people with a Project Management title or some kind of PM-related cert this question. It’s a rabbit hole at the end of the day, you may end up in Wonderland or you may end up on the other side of the world, either way you won’t understand what’s going on.

Luckily for us, I just want to figure out how it can be useful when I’m working.

As stolen from the Scrum Alliance website. Yes there’s a Scrum Alliance.

Scrum is a lightweight yet incredibly powerful set of values, principles, and practices. Scrum relies on cross-functional teams to deliver products and services in short cycles, enabling:

• Fast feedback
• Quicker innovation
• Continuous improvement
• Rapid adaptation to change
• More delighted customers
• Accelerated pace from idea to delivery

There are a ton of different methods, all of which are of varying practical value. I’m going to take a look at a few and I’m also going to throw in some thoughts and ideas of my own that are bound to be less useful than the actual PM stuff. I took a college class on this stuff once upon a time, I know a thing or two (and that’s about it).

Task Measurement

Generally speaking, project managers use some different forms of task measurement to get a grasp of what the size of something is. A common form is using Fibonacci numbers, as demonstrated below.

I personally find Fibonacci numbers for this application a bit silly. Are we Tool fans obsessing over Lateralus? Are we Leonardo DaVinci painting just about anything? No, my mind is not nearly that swole and my artistic ability is nowhere near that brilliant.

So what if instead of Fibonacci numbers, we measure in something a little more computer-related? Using filesize makes a lot of sense personally, a small file is measured in bytes, a huge file measured in gigabytes or larger. We could even say they are bytes (bite-sized tasks). _{I’m sorry…}