We use the Scrum process and strive to provide value right from the start. We don’t believe in spending a lot of time and effort on a lengthy proposal process. Scrum is built on trust and we go above and beyond to gain your trust. We have one week sprints and provide you a demo after every sprint so that you can make adjustments to what we are doing. You can adjust the backlog of work we are doing at the end of every sprint. Also, if you are not satisfied you can stop work at any sprint with no questions asked. We understand that taking a risk and moving forward with a project can be nerve wracking. That is why you deserve Scrum. You deserve to see value in the first week and you deserve to be in control of exactly what is achieved. We are fanatic about Scrum because it provides the best experience to our customers.

If you don’t know what you want then Scrum caters to you! You might not know what you want now but you will once you see something. We have worked on projects in the past where clients insisted on a Waterfall methodology and tried to define and design everything up front. They didn’t know what they wanted either but it was only months and months down the road after the project was delivered that they realized what they designed, and what we implemented for them, was not what they wanted. With Scrum you see something right out of the gate and can make adjustments as we go. We strive to add value from the first sprint and continue adding value until you decide it is good enough and tell us to stop.

We often hear that people are opposed to Agile and Scrum because there isn’t a fixed plan written on paper before any work begins. A paper with a specific amount of money and a specific number of features or ‘things’ is comforting but it isn’t reality. Scrum caters to a fixed budget by agreement that the project will stop after X number of sprints. The difference is that using Scrum we provide results right from the start. If you only have a fixed budget then we all agree we will stop after that many sprints. This is not to say we don’t provide something ‘good enough’ for you before the last sprint in which case you save the difference. There is an entire course by Alex Brown on the subject called Money For Nothing. The essence being that if we can finish in 6 months and your budget was for 2 years then you pay a percentage of the saved amount of budget to us and we stop the project before the set number of sprints we agreed. We would definitely recommend checking out the Money For Nothing concept on http://www.scruminc.com.

It is often the case in a project that stakeholders will need something ASAP. We deal with ASAP by adding those stories to the very top of the Product Backlog. Since the story is at the top of the backlog it is guaranteed to be in the next sprint. Our sprints are one week in length, so the longest a stakeholder will have to wait for action is one week. On rare occasions there is something that is urgent. For an urgent item we interrupt the sprint and have the team stop other items and deal with the urgent item. This has a high cost in velocity since the team is disrupted. Even if the interrupt is for a small “simple” item the consequences for the work that was committed in the sprint are large. When the development team is interrupted it is common that they will not be able to finish the commitment of the sprint unless they start pulling “all night’ers”. We understand there are urgent items so we have this big red button called a Sprint Interrupt that we try not to use. We like to think of a Sprint Interrupt like a fighter pilot thinks of the big red eject button. It is there in case of an emergency but you wouldn’t want to make a habit of pushing it.