The social activist and educator, Benjamin Mays, discussed about goals. He said that the tragedy in life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. It lies in having no goal to reach. However, we are all capable of reaching our goals as long as it is attainable, and we set reasonable expectations.
Mary Ann Rayla, Clicking labs Social Media Specialist, said that goals would always have to do with time management.
Effective time management always increases your productivity that allows you to accomplish more with less effort. And that is also the reason why Mary Ann is attracted to Scrum, the agile approach to software-development method used for managing software projects and product or application development. It relies on a self-organizing and cross-functional team. But most of all it epitomized about her beliefs on attaining goals.
Clicking labs, the leader in project innovation has tediously developed the Scrum project management in order to get faster development. They feel that having Scrum would eliminate them from monitoring their employee’s activities and would be more results oriented. And based on their initial findings they came up with overwhelming results. They are able to have transparency in all projects. They don’t have to constantly check their employee’s since individuals have daily goals to finish. There would be no distraction since the Scrum development doesn’t allow other things to interfere with their daily task. Employees will have a sense of responsibility on each project and a faster project implementation.
Mary Ann is the company’s designated Scrum master, and she relayed to me all the challenges that she encountered on their initial Scrum meeting. “There were a lot of arguments and questions at first, it took us hours to figure everything out and finding the right solutions to each problem. The first part would always be the crucial part, since it would be the deciding factor to move on with Scrum or to go back to our old project management…Thank God, we still end up using Scrum.” said a jubilant Mary Ann.
The scrum team has no overall leader who decides which person will do the task or how to solve a problem; instead, these issues are decided by the team as a whole. Everyone in the team must take part from idea to implementation.
Sprint is the basic unit of development in Scrum. It is a time boxed iterations and last in no more than a month. At the start, team members commit to making some number of features that were listed in the product backlog. A product backlog is a prioritized list of requirements that were defined during the sprint planning meeting when the product owner informs the team of the items he or she wants to be completed. The requirements are frozen during a sprint, meaning no one can alter the sprint backlog. After the sprint is completed, the team needs to demonstrate how to use the software.
Mary Ann took the online CSM (Certified Scrum Master) certification exam last April 20 and is now a certified Scrum master. I shared Mary Ann about the quote from Benjamin Mays, about goals and the tragedy about not having one. She agreed and laughed, as she said, “Scrum could change that tragedy.”
