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Spring Cleaning Made Easy By Scrum

March 20, 2012 | By Ilfusion Team

“Scrum” sounds more like something you’d clean out of your couch than like something you want to make a part of your every work day, but you’d be surprised at how effective this particular project management process can be for businesses. If you’ve got an enormous pile of projects and tasks in front of your team, you might consider “tidying up” with something like scrum.

The term “scrum” has a history steeped in technology development: originally called the “rugby” approach, a Japanese programming duo designed the process for managing large projects made up of small, often overlapping processes. In rugby, a scrum is when you restart a game after a minor infraction disrupts play. We use it a little differently, holding a brief scrum meeting every morning (after the work “disruption” of everyone going home for the night).

Scrum helps us work out who is working on what, and in particular who needs something from someone else in order to complete their task. For example, a Graphic Designer may need a wireframe from the Web Developer before he or she can create visual elements for a client’s website. A Social Media Copywriter may require information from an Account Manager before moving forward with an element of a campaign. By laying out what small and large tasks are being worked on every day, we can make sure everyone knows what needs to be done and by when.

Before switching to scrum, Ilfusion used the “waterfall” model, which has overlapping phases. Overall we found it to be too weak for our purposes, because it didn’t allow for having to jump back into a past phase when, as is inevitable, the client requires changes. Since switching to scrum we’ve improved our productivity as well as our communication with clients, since we always know exactly what we need from them- which saves them time as well!

Every morning during our scrum meeting, our employees get a chance to let us know if there’s a problem, figure out amongst themselves what they need from whom, and as an added bonus, it gives us some time to bond. We certainly recommend a scrum-like process to just about any business!