Have you heard of the agile methodology? It began to be used in companies as a support tool for project management in their digitization processes, in order to obtain quality results in short periods of time. In this article we will explain your bases, the actors involved and also their ceremonies. You will see the definition, elaboration and delivery of “products” that correspond to what was requested by a “customer” after an “agreement” with the work team.
Essential concepts
Before continuing, let’s review the basic terminology:
- The term product will refer to any type of deliverable (not just software) that allows the users to whom any type of action is intended.
- When referring to a customer, it is the representative of the end users for whom the product is intended. The customer must define an agreement with the functionality sought in that product described by himself with requirements in user history format.
- A project must be carried out in periods of time called sprints. Each sprint must contain at least: agreement on the user stories of the sprint +1, planning of the sprint, elaboration of user stories of the current sprint, validation of the user stories prepared and review of the work done.
- Based on the technology, and the type of user stories made the sprints can have a variable time between 1 – 4 weeks.
Actors and functions: Who intervenes and how?
In this section you will give a proper name to all the actors, who must participate actively fulfilling the objectives of the meetings to which they are convened.
Product Owner: Representative of the end user team is responsible for defining the user stories that the final product should include.
Scrum Master: It is in charge of facilitating and supervising the work of the development team.
Development Team: Execute the life cycle of production, participate in sprint meetings and keep the scrum master informed of the status of their tasks and the possible impediments that arise when performing them.
Product Manager: It deals with the prioritization between teams, is responsible for the commercial strategy of the product, dealing with conflicts between teams, monitoring and reporting of KPIs.
The basis for Agile to provide benefits is to address it as a new work mentality in which all participants are involved. This mentality is governed by 3 fundamental criteria: small fragments of value, joint validation and incremental improvement.
