Agile Methodology

A few weeks ago, I asked Sheila if it was possible for me to go on courses for me to upskill myself professionally. I felt that it was about time for me to develop some professional skills and it would also be a good call for me to take a step back to reflect on the work I’m doing in retrospect.

I signed up for the registered Scrum Master and Product Owner course under NTU PACE and used my alumni credits. Here are my learnings from the course:

The Agile methodology follows the following manifesto, which is created in order to boost work efficiency and stemmed from software development, but could possibly be applied in other fields of work. Since the work we do here at RVI is software development, it is very much applicable.

1. Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools
2. Working Product over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan

Before the course, I had a very simplistic view towards work. I would say I’m a rather efficient person and I could not comprehend why things would take so much time to go through, or why would people NOT be efficient. But work just like everything else, is people centric. People are complex creatures with different ways of thinking, and different ranges of emotions. To excel in my role, I need to build emotional resilience, empathy, and understanding for the people I work with. After all, RVI is a social business and if we remove people from the equation, the core essence of what we are advocating for would be lost.

There are three roles within an agile scrum team.

1. Product Owner
2. The Product Owner focusses on these 2 main questions:
3. What products are we creating?
4. Why are we creating this product?

The product owner has to understand the market and the target audience well. To be a good product owner, one should be a visionary in its field and predict upcoming trends or needs, conveying them to actuarial development of essential products that provide solutions to the problems within the market itself. The Product Owner acts as a middleman between market needs and the development team. Outside of the product owner’s role, they should be gathering industry insights and growing as experts within their domains of the industry.

1. Scrum Master
2. A Scrum Master focusses on this question:
3. When will the product be created?

The scrum master has to understand the development process well, and the time needed for development. The scrum master essentially works as the timekeeper within the team. They understand the importance of having the launch of the product as quickly as possible, but are also mindful of the workload placed upon the developers.

1. Developers
2. The developers focusses on this question:
3. How are we creating the product?

As the busy bees of the team, they are the hard workers with the technical expertise and knowledge to create the product itself. They clarify all their queries and doubts during the sprint planning to ensure that the products they are creating are up to market demands. It would be considered a waste effort if a product is created but does not solve market problems and is underutilised.

An efficient scrum team is ideally under 9 members. Having too many members within a team would be counter-productive to the development process. Understanding the roles within a scrum team also gave me better insights into my purpose and role in RVI. I am hired into the role to become the product owner. Forming industry relations and partnerships, understanding the problems our target audiences are facing on the ground. I then convey these problems and ideate to curate solutions to be created by our tech team and bring them to life through our team meetings.

An agile scrum team works efficiently by having regular check-ins. A complete run of one cycle is called a sprint. A sprint consists of the 8 following processes:

1. Sprint planning
2. Estimation
3. Sprint Backlog
4. Daily scrum
5. Sprint Board
6. Product Increment
7. Scrum review
8. Scrum retrospective

I understand that there are a lot of misconceptions and negative views towards the agile methodology and scrum meetings. I personally believe that with every “methodology” created, the core essence and purpose is to boost the efficiency of the workplace and they are never to incur counterproductiveness to the workplace. In fact, I am learning a lot about the inefficiencies of scrum and agile through memes appearing on IG reels.

My promise to the team is to utilise the system tactfully without disrupting our workflow completely. I don’t think there will ever be a “one size fits all” methodology but by sieving out the benefits of scrum practices, we could definitely boost workplace efficiency.

I am still slowly assimilating into my role of Product Marketing and I would like to thank my team for their patience with my inexperience, and naiveness towards my role. I believe I am picking up speed and am working towards becoming a good Product Owner.