How to work scrum into an environment with multiple applications with daily client demands [closed]

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15062053

Question

I've read up on scrum and the company I work for has started using this. I find that laying out tasks really helps everyone to see what needs to be done and what to work on. One of the issues we're running into, is that we're just "trying out" scrum with one of our projects. We have many custom built applications for clients. Some of these clients get priority over others. If they call in and demand a report, we provide.

Is there a process (scrum or otherwise) that we can utilize to help us with these demands? As it currently stands, daily demands are not calculated into our sprint as we don't have time to do story time and planning poker every day.

Any thoughts?

I did find this question that talks about how to incorporate multiple projects, but not daily demands.

Was it helpful?

Solution

You should make your clients follow a Change Management process, irrespective whether you use Scrum or not. You must agree that you're not immediately doing what your clients ask but arrange the items according to priority and plan them before doing it. If these are some urgent issues, like bugs found on production you should anyway follow the process but fix them more urgently. We're actually doing it this way:

  1. Assign a priority to the issue
  2. If it's low or normal priority add it to backlog and plan for a Sprint later on
  3. If it's urgent assign it to dedicated support engineer who'll make it without Sprint in hotfix code branch The latter point must be avoided as much as possible.

OTHER TIPS

Perhaps Scrum is not the right agile approach for you as it is more suited to teams where work can be planned in advance, e.g. one to four weeks at a time.

For teams that do support and maintenance, I suggest looking at Kanban.

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