Agile Scrum for knowledge professionals: Bottom-up

This piece is part of a series of articles exploring how Agile Scrum makes an interesting proposition for any group of knowledge professionals.  You can get the details in full via my white paper [download it here].

Bottom-up

Agile could be considered a "Bottom up" approach because everything from estimation to delivery is done by the team, not by leads. In the agile approach, leads become facilitators rather than gatekeepers and controllers. The goal of the facilitators is to ensure the team have everything they need to make decisions and execute their skills.  A common mistake, when moving from traditional process models to agile working, is that the leads continue to make decisions on behalf of the team.  That is no longer their role.

Agile assumes that end-user-value-add takes priority over traditional constraints (time, scope, resources, cost & quality). Everything the team works on, in the agile approach, is focused on the "story". The story is an end user value proposition. The story is more than a means to control scope because it focuses the attention, at all times, on the benefit, not the process.  Stories generally need to satisfy the INVEST  criteria.

Agile ensures decisions are made at the time when it is most appropriate (i.e. when the right information is available). Traditional approaches favour more up front decision making when the required information is not as readily available.

During estimation, the team focuses on the relative size of the story, not actual effort. During the planning stage, the team focuses on the velocity of story output, not the time things take. During the delivery phase, team effort is focused around an agreed set of stories and benefit they encapsulated rather than every part of the project.   The Story encapsulates the benefit and also protects the team’s ability to deliver value whilst not losing sight of the end game.