I have worked in and around the software industry for the past 15 years, during which time I have seen the best and worst ways of running projects. The pressures of building software are extreme – the clients need it, the marketers want to talk about it, sales want to sell it, the support team wants it to work and the CEO wants to see the revenue return for the investment in so many developers! As a result, software development organisations need to embrace project management methodologies and systems that will make them more efficient, more productive and help reduce the overall risk associated with projects running behind.

 

There are many methodologies associated with the development of Software, however, possibly the most popular of all today is that of Agile. Agile software development is a set of principles for software development in which requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams.

 

Agile provides teams with a lightweight framework to help with a constantly changing functional and technical environment. This same framework can be applied to many other business scenarios to reduce risk associated with projects, improve productivity, accelerate time to market, and improve overall visibility of work in progress.

 

Scrum, is an iterative, time based approach to implementing Agile, and is used by organisations such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo and many others.

 

Scrum has 3 primary roles: the Product Owner, the Scrum Master and the Team. These people form the Scrum.  Work for the scrum starts as a prioritized, high-level wish list of requirements (Product Backlog), defined by the Product Owner, from which the team will start working on a subset of this list (Sprint Backlog), containing the most important items, which can be delivered over a defined period of time (Sprint). During each sprint, there are a series of important, identifiable meetings, which are critical to ensuring the successful outcome from each sprint. These meetings include:

  • Backlog refinement: review session of the product features to be built, as prioritized by the product owner.
  • Sprint planning: this is where the team identifies the tasks that need to be completed during the sprint
  • Daily scrum: 15 minute daily standup meeting where 3 questions are answered by the team – What I did yesterday, what I will do today, what is getting in my way.
  • Sprint review: The team reviews and present what it accomplished in the last sprint
  • Sprint retrospective: opportunity to reflect on how the team is working and ways to improve in future

 

While Agile and Scrum have their roots in the software industry, an increasing number of teams outside software are starting to embrace an Agile way of working because many of the same tenets of Agile can be applied to their project types as well.

 

Minute-it enables you to apply Agile-Scrum methodology to all your projects no matter how big or small your business is, or which industry you work in. With Minute-it, you can capture all details for your product and sprint backlog, build the tasks from your sprint planning, assign your scrum roles, manage all your scrum meetings and monitor progress on your scrum board.


Scrum Meetings in Minute-it


Minute-it is the only platform of it’s kind to address the growing need for better meeting management. To learn more about using Minute-it in your business, visit https://minute-it.com and start for free today.