One Year of Scrum

It has been already a year since we fully implemented Scrum for absolutely everything at Kokoen.

Of course, we had used Scrum before for some projects, but I am talking here about using it for everything. Really everything. Bookkeeping, sales, marketing, etc.. even for tasks merely related to the office like buying furniture or decoration, planing team parties, etc.

The company is now a project, and everything that needs to be done gets written as a ticket and planned into a weekly sprint, which means that absolutely every action we do has been planned at least a week before.

Using Scrum to manage the whole company has brought a few advantages:

• More efficiency:

Having to write down every task as a ticket and describing in detail how and why it should be done helps you not only understand better the task itself but to even think of more efficient ways of solving the problem that this task is aimed at solving.

There are a lot of questions that come to your mind when writing the task: how can I make my colleagues understand what needs to be done? Which issues are they going to have? Am I going to understand myself this task if I read it a few weeks from now? How can I facilitate things?

Having to ask yourself all those questions helps thinking of more natural and more straightforward ways of addressing problems. Even more than that: sometimes, when planing some tickets, the team may also realize that this task may not be so necessary or even not needed at all: do we want to do that? Do we need to that?

• Understand your job and the job of the colleagues:

Everyone knows better what he has to do and its deadlines. But he also knows what other colleagues are working at. Like this, you can better synchronize or even offer your help if you see someone may be needing it.

• Resource planning

For me, as a CEO, it helps me have an overview of the workload everyone is having and its progress without having to ask or directly for status updates.

This helps me and the team itself to better balance the workload distributing the task as reasonable and fair as possible.

• Better cash flow

Since absolutely everything is planned, we can better know when we are going to be able to send this invoice, or when we have to receive this other invoice.

• Respect Priorities

It helps to establish and respect priorities. There is no place for improvisation now or for spontaneous decisions that can change the workflow, deadlines or targets, or any other person. What has been planed must be done.

We get the job done as it was planned to be done. Just as easy as this. I can’t even imagine going back to working without Slack.