Delivering value to the business

Scrum delivers value to the business through:

• Every iteration the product is ready to ship.


• Adapt to changing requirements: Short iterations mean that the Product Owner provides frequent feedback. As result there are frequent small course corrections as opposed to massive changes late in the project.


• Visibility of progress: delivering a working product at the end of every iteration means that the customer, executive sponsors and other interested parties can see the product take shape. They are not surprised six weeks before release.


• Accurate tracking of how much work is left before release: the combination of the product backlog and the team's velocity (aka Yesterday's weather in XP speak) means that you tell how much the team will get done by the release date.


• Lightweight requirements: Since the team is in frequent (preferably daily contact) with the Product Owner, she spends less time writing detailed requirements. Instead she is able focus on making decisions and answering questions from developers.


• Process improvement mechanism to meet business needs: As business needs change – SOX, FDA compliance, through the retrospective the Scrum process can be improved and adapted to meet goals and needs in changing environments.

In short, Scrum provides a way for the business to maximize its ROI by using iterative development to rapidly create working software. It ensures that the team is always working to deliver the highest priority features.

The next post in this series will cover how the elements of Scrum create the right environment for the formation of high performance teams. This post will be hosted in my own blog: Notes From a Tool User

This article written by Mark Levison.