Scrum Fundamentals - Back To The Essence

In the heat of "the battle" teams tend to forget why they use the Scrum framework after all, and what the foundations are of it. Why do we have Sprint Planning sessions every other week, why does our Product Owner has these or those accountabilities, why did we started using a team board after all, why did... 

There are loads of blogs and articles on specific practices, tools and techniques. Some easy, some way more advanced. Whatever the practices you and your team are using, there are some fundamentals that always need to be taken into account. Always.

I want to bring you back to these foundations, to the fundamentals of the Scrum framework. Not basic, or easy, or straightforward things. No. To the foundations. If you don't have solid foundations, a house collapses sooner or later. If you don't understand these underlying concepts and keep them alive, your use of the Scrum framework will feel mechanical, robotic, probably boring and likely no longer useful.

A professional use of the Scrum framework though is not about “doing” Scrum, doing the events or having the artefacts. Everything we do while aiming for professionally using Scrum has something to do with at least one of the following, probably a few, or hopefully all of these underlying concepts. It are the pillars that uphold Scrum.

• Empiricism: knowledge comes from experience, and we make decisions based on what is known. Empiricism has three pillars, and Scrum is built on these: transparency, inspection and adaptation. Each of the Scrum visible elements exist to grow an empirical approach.
• Scrum Values: when the Scrum Team lives the values of commitment, courage, focus, openness and respect, then empiricism starts to work and trust is being built. And trust is needed to grow transparency. During each of the Scrum Events, all of the Scrum Team members are expected to grow in living the values.
• the Scrum Team becomes more and more self-managing and cross-functional. They build up all skills needed to create value each and every Sprint, and they can decide what work needs to be done, who does it and how to do it in the most effective way. Both self-managing and cross-functional allow the team to reduce outside dependencies; which allows to move swifter towards the real target: user value.
• during each Sprint, a Done Increment of working product is created at least once, so that it can be released if it provides enough value to the market, the users, the stakeholders. Work that is not Done, i.e. that is not of a quality level that can be handed over to users, is not releasable. Work that cannot be released cannot provide value. While the ScrumGuide states "Sprints are the heartbeat of Scrum, where ideas are turned into value".

So let me repeat this: everything we do while aiming for a professional, impactful use of Scrum has something to do with at least one of the above, probably a few, or hopefully all of these underlying concepts.

This is what I cover in the professional Scrum fundamentals series: short insights and reminders on how everything ties back to these core concepts.

You can choose to have a 2-minute read, weekly in your mailbox, as your weekly guide, your weekly reminder. If that is your preference, you can enrol to the mail series. Or you can choose to just dive into it and start reading the different posts in the Scrum.org community.

Prompt: questioning or challenging with your team how you see the core concepts mentioned above coming back in your current ways of working.

I hope you will find value in these short articles and if you are looking for more clarifications, feel free to take contact.

Scrum on!