5-1-2024
C.T.N. Strong
There are many similarities and differences in the Scrum approach to project management and the conventional plan-based approaches. These differences and similarities can be visible when looking at the effectiveness of the allocation of resources regarding manpower and cost, team comradery, and role changes within the teams. When it comes to the allocation of people to projects, the Scrum approach consists of no more than seven members within its self-organized team (Sommerville, 2015). Instead of having a project manager, the Scrum team has a ScrumMaster, who to the team is not to be thought of as a project manager (Sommerville, 2015). The role of the ScrumMaster is not to give directives to the rest of the team but to report to senior management, perform project administration and assist in purchases (Sommerville, 2015). The way that the Scrum approach allocates its team members is effective because these team members act in unison, with all team members participating in the creation of short-term goals and collectively making the decision on who works are different parts of the project. On the other hand, the plan driven approach follows the traditional team set up where this is a project manager who oversees determining the direction of the project as well as who will implement the different aspects of the project. In comparison, both the ScrumMaster and the project manager both report to the senior lead and have their role in the hiring of new talent as well as the purchasing of the needed resources for projects.
In the Scrum approach, estimating the cost of a project lies heavily on the team’s ability to accurately predict how projects will take. This projection occurs through determining the team’s estimation of their speed of completing items in their backlog based on prior rates of speed. This proves to be effective because it creates a system that attempts to produce increments of the project in the most efficient ways based on the prioritizing of the most important items within the project. On the other hand, the plan-driven approach allocates a lot of its money to planning and risk-calculations. This could be seen as a waste of monetary resources because while all this time is spent on planning and calculating risk, it could have been used to get farther in the process of working on the actual project itself. Adversary, front planning could be viewed as a money saving based on the ability to find problems before starting on the project which could save resources further along in the project.
Both Scrum approach and plan-driven approach attempt to save resources through the management of time. The plan-driven takes a more front-end approach through extensive planning and risk reduction while the Scrum approach works more on the fly by trying to make the most of times time through prioritizing and working on the top priority items.
The Scrum approach demonstrates an exceptional maintaining team cohesion. It does this through the team’s daily interactions. The team develops a Scrum board which provides daily information about where everyone is at in the project, availability of team members, backlogs, and work to be done. This shared resource proves effective in making sure all team members can visually see where the team collectively stands as well as provide a way for all team members to add and contribute, this leads to making sure all team members remain united within the project. Another aspect to mention about the Scrum approach is that the team hold daily meetings with they are in the process of activity tackling certain aspects of the project within a certain time frame. These daily meetings ensure that team members can share information and plan accordingly. The plan-driven approach effectiveness towards team cohesion is not as evident. Teamwork quality can greatly influence the outcome of a project; effective team functioning is regarded as one of the success factors by those in project management (Wlodarski, 2020). Although the plan-driven approach does require that some of the software development team work together to complete items, it does not have an embedded system which ensures that all team members clearly know what is going on within the entire team. Because of its more traditional construction of having a traditional project manager, much of the responsibility of the collaboration of the team is placed on the project manager instead of on the united team. In comparison, both approaches have different people working on different items but with Scrum the team is more unified and are expected to daily communicate as a whole and actively participate in shared communications.
When it comes to managing changes within the team’s membership, the Scrum approach demonstrates effectiveness through its ability to create distributed teams. The Scrum approach proves itself to be versatile when it comes to the expansion of its team members to be able to possess members worldwide. This approach can be carried out remotely, using remote features such as virtual meetings as well as virtual whiteboards. This gives additional room for the ability for the team to include the most highly trained members from around the world as well as the ability to become more productive which increases monetary gain from being able to form teams that can work 24 hours a day from around the world (Sommerville, 2015).
Unfortunately, due to the way the plan-driven approach is set up, changes do occur based on outdated needs for certain aspects of the project because of the length of time it can take to get to the project. This can cause the need to not only cancel portions of the project but also get rid of team members who are working on that portion of the project. In comparison both approaches amp to change, it is just that Scrum is likely to upscale its members while plan-driven can likely have to downsize its team members because of outdated projections. Both do have times where they lose team members, but plan-driven loss of staff would most likely be due to prolonged planning instead of actively working on the project.
In conclusion, when it comes to comparing the Scrum approach with the plan-driven approach, based on the more effectiveness of the Scrum approach in comparison with the plan-driven approach, the Scrum approach is one that I would want to work in the future. It gives more room for team self-organization, project flexibility, team creativity and collaboration.
References
Sommerville, I (2015). Software Engineering (10th ed.). Pearson. ISBN- 9780133943030
Wlodarski, R., Poniszewska-Maranda, A., & Falleri, J.-R. (2020). Comparative Case Study of Plan-Driven and Agile Approaches in Student Computing Projects. 2020 International Conference on Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks (SoftCOM),
Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks (SoftCOM), 2020 International Conference On, 1–6. https://doi-
org.lopes.idm.oclc.org/10.23919/SoftCOM50211.2020.9238196