Introduction to Scrum | Scrum Fundamentals and an Initial Overview of Scrum

Hey guys, in this Scrum course I'm going to teach you everything you need to know about Scrum. This will allow you to become either a Scrum team member, a Scrum master, a product owner or just someone who is really really passionate about Scrum and can share that knowledge with your work colleagues and with other people to reach your goals and to help the business drive value for the organization. We're also going to cover Scrum fundamentals in this course, which is essentially and pretty much the essence of Scrum. You need to understand what Scrum is all about before you start applying it. So of course, we'll start off with the definition of Scrum. What it is, you know what are its origins, what's involved in Scrum, how do you apply it? What are the rituals that are part of it? What are the practices? Everything that's involved in you working and utilizing Scrum in your business. And then, we're also going to talk about what makes it different and special versus other frameworks or versus other methodologies. And I'm going to compare it, especially directly with waterfall project management and the traditional way in which projects are managed and you're going to see major major differences between the way people normally manage projects and the way you manage them using Scrum. And this, of course, is part of what you need to learn and what you need to do to become a Scrum master. Because one of your big roles as a Scrum master is educating others on what Scrum is, how to use it, its power and its value. So we're also going to talk about why Scrum is so valuable and so important and why so many businesses and organizations love it and why there's such a big demand and such a big appetite for Scram and Scrum masters all over the world across many different industries and pretty much across any type of project. Now, the other thing we're going to cover in this course is how it can help you reach your goals, how Scrum can get you closer to those goals and why it's a lot better than other ways and traditional ways of delivering products and traditional ways of reaching your goals. So let's dive right into it okay. What is Scrum? Right. One of the things we want to learn in this course is what it means, what it is, and basically what you need to keep your mind , is that Scrum is a framework to solve problems and deliver value. That's it in essence that's what Scrum is. It helps you resolve problems and deliver value to your customers. But it's also an agile methodology. It's one of the many agile methodologies out there but it's actually the most popular agile methodology out there. And there's a reason for that. There's a reason why it's actually the most popular agile methodology and it has to do with the simplicity and the power of Scrum. It's also an iterative, time-boxed approach. And this is key by the way, this is key because it is part of the essence of Scrum as a framework which is, that it's something that you build on and continuously iterate and improve in a time-boxed fashion. Right? And by time-boxed in Scrum we're going to be talking about sprints, we'll go for the concept a little bit later on. But basically I just want you to keep in mind that sprint is a tiny box in which you're delivering something, agile and it's particularly in Scrum a methodology or as a framework where we talk about sprints. We want to talk about a tiny box that is generally of two weeks, although it can go up to four weeks. But most Scrum teams will be using a two week sprint period. You'll find differences out there between different time, between different teams working with Scrum because some of them will prefer, you know will use a faster period of time like a one week sprint. Others will use a longer sprint time box like a two weeks, three weeks up to four weeks. But generally I'd recommend that you use a two week sprint and that's what we call a time boxed approach which means you're delivering something over a specific set timeframe which in Scrum we call sprints. Incremental delivery with continuous improvement is at the essence and at the core of Scrum. And by that, I mean that you're continuously delivering and incrementally improving what you're delivering. And by that, you know what I'm trying to say or what I'm trying to convey here with this particular point is that you don't just go writing and deliver the end solution when you're delivering something in Scrum. You start with something simple. While we generally call the MVP or minimum viable product and then you build on top of that as you're incrementally and gradually delivering value to your customers, to your business, to your stakeholders, to the people that are working with you on the project and so forth. It's also customer centric and it focuses on value delivering often and delivering quickly. This guides are the essence and at the core of Scrum. In Scrum we don't want to be waiting a year to deliver something like you see in traditional project management, which generally is referred to as waterfall project management. In waterfall project management, things are generally delivered in sequence and they take a longer period of time to deliver. There is key, time frames, phases, milestones and that generally leads sometimes and a lot of time to longer timeframes, sometimes inefficiencies, sometimes bureaucracy, sometimes unnecessary documentation, sometimes too much documentation and that's exactly what Scrum doesn't do. Scrum is pretty much the opposite to all of that. It's very customer centric. It's very value focused. It's also very quick and it's also about delivering often iteratively and gradually and the other really cool thing about Scrum is that in Scrum, you are very adaptable, you're very flexible and you're very fast so you don't have to do everything at once. You don't have to have the whole solution, from the get go. You can build on it, you can adapt and you can be very flexible with what you're delivering. And when I'm talking about adapting in Scrum, we're going to be covering this a little bit later on but we're going to be talking about retrospectives. Think a little bit as a lesson's learned session but it's a very particular Scrum ritual, which allows to continuously improve, to reflect, to adapt on what we're seeing or what we're learning right there on the spot before we get started with the next time-box, which we already talked about, is called what? Yep that's right guys. I heard you say it in your mind or think about it in your mind. It's called sprints. Yes. In Scrum we talk about sprints which is that time-box in which we're delivering value to the customer, and value in Scrum we call user stories which are basically requirements. And again I'm going to cover a lot of that in more detail later on but I want to just start getting yourself familiarized with the terminology and everything that we use in Scrum as a process. Right? So a couple of terms that I've already covered that we're going to talk a lot later on in more detail but I've already covered in the initial session on what is Scrum, our sprints, right? The time in which we deliver value or user stories, their requirements and the work that gets done which in Scrum we call user stories, right? And there is a reason why they're called users stories because it's essentially telling the story of what needs to be done and why we need to do that. OK. And we'll talk about how that looks like later on. And then we also cover another key concept in Scrum which are retrospectives which are essentially lessons learned and how we reflect for improvement. So that's it guys that's what Scrum is all about. As you can see in essence Scrum is just it's a different way of delivering projects, a faster way of delivering projects and it allows you to solve problems in the business and deliver value to your end users, to your customers. Iteratively, gradually and in a time box approach that it. It's very very simple and I can tell you from experience that scrum works and that scrum is amazing, it's really amazing when you see teams that have been working on something for so long and are struggling with delivery, are taking forever to take, you know to deliver or to come up with solutions or to provide value for the business. And then guys when you start working with Scrum and you start delivering quickly and delivering often you'd make such a huge difference and you see so much value for the business that you're just going to continue to use this in your projects that you're working on, new initiatives. It's something that the value is going to a record, you know the business is going to start recognizing the value, and you're going to see the difference and why it's such a popular framework and methodology in the current and modern world to deliver projects.