Greetings! In today's post I'm going to talk about Adaptation – the third pillar of Scrum together with Transparency, which I mentioned in the post The Scrum Pillars: Transparency (Only available in portuguese), and Inspection, about which I commented on the post The Scrum Pillars: Inspection. The three concepts make the project management process much more healthy, easy to detect any deviations and avoid waste with rework, always trying to reach the best aggregated value to the client.
The characteristics of Adaptation are strongly present in the Scrum process through the Scrum ceremonies and the stipulation of the Sprint timebox.
When we talk about Sprints, the timebox is relatively small, approximately two weeks, in relation to the prescritive development process. This allows the Scrum Pillars to give a faster feedback of what is being done. If what is being done isn't really aggregating value to the client, the process is quickly adapted through the other Scrum practices.
On the daily meetings it is possible to signalize to all team members the previous day progress, the impediments that were brought up and devise a short term strategy for the day that follows. Being characterized as a form of Adaption at Sprint level, it aims at adapting in order to reach the goal.
In case of deviations from the Project goal, the Transparency provided by Review meetings along with the Inspection made by the Product Owner during these reunions, allows the the P.O. to make new priorizations in the Product Backlog, what is considered an Adaptation form, thereby changing the strategy that will be done in the next Sprints and putting the Project back on track.
Another very important topic related to Adaptation is the Retrospective meeting. Here, the adjustment is made through the team members perspective, correcting potential problems that are occurring internally and adjusting the team dynamics. In my point of view, this one is the most important form of Adaptation, because the team should be the as most self-organized as possible, or the effort to reach the goal of a Sprint will be much higher.
This is the last post of the Scrum Pillars Trilogy. My focus was on how the Scrum Pillars are present in all Scrum Cerimonies and Artifacts, and how important it is to give the proper attention to all the details, so your project management can be the most consistent as possible.
