What is the “Agile Ball” (referring to the “Elite Customer”) and what does it mean? What can you do with this framework?
The term “Agile” (as in Agile Development) refers to a set of methodologies, best practices, and tools for software development. It has been in use since 1995, when Joe Gebbia published his book on the subject. Although there are several ways to approach this topic, I prefer to use “Kanban,” meaning “to organize the flow of work,” or “OOP,” which is “object-oriented programming.” Kanban and OOP are generally used interchangeably.
In “The Lean Enterprise: Better, Faster, and Cheaper,” Michael Abrash wrote, “To make the best use of Kanban, we need to make the customer journeys represent journeys through many different environments.” By making the customer journeys represent many different environments, agile means that one can handle more customers concurrently with less effort.
In Scrum, teams use an iterative methodology called “story points” to implement a task. The teams start by planning each “story point” and then they complete it during a sprint. After completing all the stories in a sprint, the team calls “stampede” to completion of the next story.
The “scrum process” is derived from a French acronym called SCRUM. It has been popular since the mid-nineties when Richard McIndoe introduced it in his book, “The Agile Enterprise.” SCRUM stands for “Scrum, Continuous Integration and Deployment,” or “Continuous Integration and Delivery with Slimming Down.”
Scrum has been adapted in a number of ways, including Kanban, and Micro-Scrum. Sprint reviews were originally designed to assess how well the team was moving toward its goal of being done with one sprint and to identify weak points and problems. As the Scrum community evolved, it also became possible to engage in collaboration to drive these values.
The Agile philosophy is about goal-setting and prioritizing, and involves delegating responsibility. This can be difficult for some organizations, because they prefer to have things all to themselves. “Sprint reviews” allow one team to review another team’s progress, not just by looking at the works in progress, but by reviewing their requirements, goals, and vision. This allows them to see if they are on the same page.
Before taking the “scrum” approach, it is important to first understand what a scrum team is and how they fit into an agile environment. They don’t do anything any more than any other team; they just provide a pattern. There is no “agile” version of a “scrum team.” “Agile”scrum” are terms that describe a framework of collaboration and sharing.