Survey about SCRUM use (1 of 4)

Goal

It is not a secret at all that Scrum has been a growing trend during the last year and that has become mainstream in the software development methodologies arena.

Although Scrum is well know and has plenty of information, with contents ranging from process and roles descriptions, agile and tooling HOW-TOs, etc. we do not know a lot about its real impact on the adopting companies.

I have helped to improve their processes to many companies where Scrum was being used, following tightly or roughly the process, so I had my personal opinion but I wanted to have a more quantitative knowledge about that impact.

So that I ran a survey to the students of the Máster en IT Project Management in UPC School, gathering 12 responses. I would like to publish a short series of posts from the analysis of the results. They are:

• Post 1: SCRUM benefits
• Post 2: SCRUM challenges
• Post 3: Tailoring SCRUM
• Post 4: Usage of agile techniques within SCRUM

I would like to make this blog more interactive with you, I see this survery as a first step to it.

Last but not least, I would like to thank to my partner David Coloma by his help in the analysis of the data.

Translation note

This survey was run in Spanish and for the sake of simplicity, the answers and graphics copied in this post have not been translated. The translation for those terms are:

Nada = Nothing, Poco = Little, Bastante = Quite, Mucho = A lot, Respuestas = Responses

Part 1: SCRUM benefits

The question in this section are included under the section "P2. ¿In which aspects of the project management could SCRUM help?

P2.1. To stabilize the work days.

The first analysis if the results is that, surprisingly, 60% of the respondents claim that the usage of Scrum help them little or nothing.

If we consider their experience with Scrum (P4.4) we could think that they haven't reached a profficient use of Scrum. Another factor could be the lack of knowledge that 50% of the respondants admit in question P3.4. 

Other factors that may impact are the lack of credibility of Scrum (P3.2) and the weak support by the management (P3.3). That last should be an alarm signal, since they are "killers" of the effectiveness of change management in any organization.

Curiously, the answers to the questions P2.3 and P2.4 appear to show that the teams are taken into consideration when it comes to plan and monitor the projects, facts that seem contradictory with the answers.

P2.2. To make clear the relationship with sales and the client.

Other of the advantages that are frequently highlighted about Scrum is that it improves the communication with the stakeholders external to the team, so frequently are the sales representative and the client. 

The results of this question have little to analyze, since more than 80% of the respondents say that it Scrum does not improve the communication with those. The explanation could be again the lack of credibility of Scrum in the rest of the organization (P3.2) and the weak support by the management (p3.3).

These factors could point out that if the team internally uses Scrum with effectiveness, the management and the sales representatives are not closely involved in the communication with the clients.

              

P2.3. To plan the projects more rationally.

Even the fact that the two previous questions show a negative balance, it seems that the teams recognize a clear internal improvement in the way that projects are managed. A ratio of 2 out of 3 of the respondents points out that Scrum help them quite or a lot to planify projects more rationally.

This seems to show that the team feel more control about their work, even more taking into consideration that they feel more involved in the aspects of the project monitoring, as it is shown in the next question (P2.4).

P2.4. To listen more to the team during the project monitoring.

Other of the main features of the agile methodologies is, without any doubt, the more organizational flat, self-organizing and participatory approach to the decission taking.

In this case, this feature seems to be realized since 2/3 of the respondents say that Scrum allows them to increase their influence quite or a lot in the projects, it is even more relevant that more than 40% of them feel they are "very" involved in the project monitoring.

Conclusions

The main conclusions are that the main benefits seem to be the higher selfmanagement capacity and the more realisting planning of the projects.

In contrast, the popularly stated benefits of the communication improvement with the external actors and the more stable work days failed to be observed. Perhaps the lack of experience of the teams and the weak management support may have to do partially with this.

In the next post we will talk about more concretely about the challenges and problems that arise during the adoption of Scrum.

To read more

Two surveys about Scrum run by the Software Engineering Institute [1] and by James Brett of ScrumMaster.com.au [2], which had a bigger base of respondents and analyze other interesting aspects.

[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mcp/agile/scrum.html

[2] http://www.scrumalliance.org/resources/556