What is Agile and Scrum?

Nowadays too many organizations and professionals are talking about the adoption of Agile Scrum due its advantages and benefits. But first, we need to clearly understand what Agile and Scrum entail, in order to better determine its effects in a business environment.

What is Agile?

The term Agile according with Oxford Dictionary means, ‘to move quickly and easily, or to think quickly and in an intelligent way.’ This definition brings to us the idea of speeding up the time it takes to deliver a product or a service to a customer with efficiency (using the resources in the best way possible). And honestly speaking, most organizations are chasing this goal in their businesses.

Organizations are constantly seeking for new and different ways to reinvent their product delivery, but surprisingly, the Agile concept has been around since 2001 with the Agile Manifesto. During the past several years, the Development areas of organizations have begun to feel the benefits of working in an Agile Way of Thinking. During the last few years other IT and Business Areas started to see the main benefits of the Agile Scrum adoption and started to use it in different areas, including the Infrastructure and Service Delivery field, enabling the famous and desirable ‘transformation’.

Agile will provide a new mindset for companies and professionals tapping into Simplicity instead of Complexity, so that they can focus on the customer and expect changes in their projects.

The Agile mindset will instigate the creation of groups of professionals that are able to develop something working and ready to use. These groups (more commonly called Teams) will work based on prioritized requirements or solutions, in an iterative way of collaborating directly one with each other and being self-organized.

It all looks quite simple when we understand the mindset behind the term Agile, but the mindset is not enough. We need to connect this idea with other practices to guarantee that benefits will be achieved. The most common and used practice is what we call Scrum.

What is Scrum?

Scrum can be defined as process to build products and/or services that will focus reaching the business/customer needs with simplicity. The Scrum practices will enable a better collaboration between the involved teams and deliver the products/services incrementally and empirically.

The practice will embrace 3 main different things:

• Roles
  • Scrum Master
  • Product Owner
  • Development Team
• Artifacts
  • Product Backlog
  • Sprint Backlog
  • Increment
• Scrum events
  • Sprint
  • Sprint Planning
  • Daily Scrum
  • Sprint Review
  • Sprint Retrospective

The combination of both Agile and Scrum, also known as simply Agile Scrum, will provide the Agile mindset for businesses independently of the teams type such as development, infrastructure or service delivery. It will also establish a structured and simple framework for products and services delivery – called Scrum.

This perfect combination represents one of the main reasons for EXIN’s investment in the Agile Scrum program. We could cover not only the mindset or the framework, but both worlds together, reflecting the right usage in the market world-wide and better preparing the professionals to achieve the business and customers’ goals and needs.