Blending PRINCE2 with SCRUM Sprints – Part 1
Many folks get hung up about agile and scrum. The difference is large. Agile is an adjective used to describe a wide variety of practices conforming to the values of the agile manifesto and the 12 agile principles.
Whereas scrum is a framework for organizing your work.
Which do think blends best with PRINCE2?
Scrum of course!
So scrum and agile are not interchangeable.
Trying to flex PRINCE2 with Agile is complex because so many of the working parts need to be harnessed together to make them work. Blending PRINCE2 with SCRUM sounds daunting right?
Now compare PRINCE2 with Scrum.
Scrum is an empirical exposure model meaning knowledge is gained from real life experience and decisions are made on that experience. It’s just the way of organizing your project with the benefits that scrum provides a structure for increased efficiency and faster results.
It is obvious that the heart of scrum fits hand in glove with the PRINCE2 Managing Product Delivery process. Sure, you also need linkages with the other PRINCE2 processes, but luckily, those PRINCE2 links are already ‘plumbed in’
Take a PRINCE2 Work Package as an example here
A work package is just that, it’s a container with all the information needed ready packed to pass onto a third party with responsibility for creating the products.
It’s just the language and concepts that are the difference between PRINCE2 and Scrum.
PRINCE2 Scrum Management stages and sprints
PRINCE2 management stages are different to technical stages – but they needn’t be.
A PRINCE2 management stage is defined as:
“The section of a project that the project manager is managing on behalf of the project board at any one time, at the end of which the project board will wish to review progress to date, the state of the project plan, the business case and risks and the next stage plan, in order to decide whether to continue with the project”
Whereas the definition of a Scrum sprint is:
“A Sprint is a time-box of one month or less during in which a potentially releasable product Increment is created”
Not so different are they?
That’s one of the many reasons why blending PRINCE2 with Scrum is so straightforward
PRINCE2 Product descriptions
A product description contains all the information needed for an individual or a team to create the product, then carry out testing and quality checking activities.
In scrum, the user story is used to write a requirement in the form of who, what and why. In essence, this contains very similar information to the PRINCE2 product description.
For all practical purposes, PRINCE2 product descriptions and scrum user stories can be blended into one item.
Rather than having all of the customer’s requirements held within one or more documents, in scrum, these requirements exist as a customer prioritized list of user stories held within a scrum artifact called a Product Backlog.
As part of sprint planning, the highest priority user stories are pulled off the product backlog and form what is called the Sprint Backlog.
Also in sprint planning, the team exam and each of the Sprints, and defined the tasks and resources needed to convert one or more user stories into a potentially shippable product.
During the sprint planning meeting, the team selects the product backlog items they can complete during the coming sprint. It is likely that each product backlog item is turned into multiple sprint backlog items, and each one of these is represented by a toss card that is placed on the scrum task board /see later)
Based on the above few paragraphs, it’s fairly easy to see that the following situations can easily be set up:
- A management stage could consist of a single sprint
- A management stage could contain several sprints
- A management stage could consist of a single work package
- A management stage could contain several work packages
- A work package could contain a single sprint
- A work package could contain several sprints
- A work package could contain several sprints and the release into operational use of one or more products
- A work package can contain one or several user stories
Good. Now you have the background, and assuming a reasonable knowledge of PRINCE2, let me take you into a journey within a scrum sprint…
Just like a work package, the very first thing that needs to occur within a sprint is to carry out sprint planning.
So, imagine you are a member of the scrum development team currently at the beginning of a PRINCE2 Stage…
You have carried out sprint planning and a busy developing the user stories into products.
Unlike a work package with fixed time and dates, the scrum sprint has a fixed end date, butts the empowered scrum development team can add or subtract requirements (user stories) from the work to be carried out within the sprint.
This means, that the scrum development team will creates the highest priority products within the fixed sprints time-frame.
No surprise then, that during the scrum sprint, team members are likely to update the sprint backlog as new information is available. A characteristic of a scrum sprint is its daily scrum meeting.
At this daily scrum, the estimated work remaining in the sprint is calculated and illustrated by the scrum master in an information radiator called a sprint Burndown chart:
This type of illustration is exactly the type of information needed when the team is working against an agreed sprint end date.
The hours work remaining provide them with unambiguous information with the work effort in hours that can be used for product creation.
At the beginning of each sprint, based on the development team estimates, they pulled sufficient user stories into the scrum sprint.
