Risk, in a loosely deconstructed term, is loss of profits in your business. Regardless of where the risk is coming from, if it isn’t mitigated, your company loses money. The higher the risk, the greater likelihood of losing money.
Scrum is a great way to combat the worry of high risk issues creating loss. If you’re asking why, I’ll be happy to answer. Through a constant, healthy feedback loop that comes naturally with iterative, incremental development, you decrease your exposure to risk. The greatest length of a Sprint cycle is one month, meaning, at most you’ll lose a month with your project as you gain feedback from it.
A month might seem like a lot of time, but imagine if the overall project demanded a full 11 months of development time alone. This would not include all of the documentation, proposals, etc, that comes before your development team is able to sink their teeth into the project itself. If you’re developing for 11 months before you gain any outside feedback, you could end up developing a product no one wants or needs once it comes out of cycle.
With Scrum, however, you have the chance to receive constant feedback as your project moves along. If the market changes while you’re developing, now you have the chance to adapt with the market, in close to real time. Maintaining a flexible, adaptable, agile method of development allows your business to receive direct feedback in order to make any necessary changes to your project before you’re backed into a corner with a wasted product, which in turn kills the morale of your developers who no longer have a completed product to show off, whether out of pride or out of portfolio need.
Keep your team happy and productive by empowering them to develop high quality products they are proud of. Scrum not only reduces your project’s overall risk, but also is an inclusive, transparent practice that puts the people doing the work at the heart of the project.
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