How does scrum help leadership teams pick the most valuable work to focus on?

How does scrum help leadership teams pick the most valuable work to focus on?

It doesn’t.

Scrum is a lightweight agile framework; it has nothing in it that helps leadership teams pick the most valuable work to focus on. Sure, it provides a framework for decision-making, but it doesn’t do the work for you.

Some people have remarked that ‘scrum doesn’t solve problems; it highlights problems’ and this is in a similar vein. It may not help you pick the most valuable work to focus on, but it will highlight where you are making mistakes, wasting time and effort, and where organizational dysfunctions are present.

It is the leadership team’s responsibility to identify the most valuable work, not scrum.

If you are in business, and you are the person making decisions about where to invest, what to invest in, and why investment is needed – based on your interpretation of the market demands – then you are the person who needs to make a call.

Scrum can’t do that for you. Kanban can’t do that for you. No agile framework can do that for you.

Leaders need to understand their business, understand their customers, understand their competitors and leverage scrum to create rapid, valuable feedback loops that will inform whether they are working on the most valuable problems and solutions.

So, yes, the scrum framework can help provide you with the insight, feedback, and empirical evidence you need to make great decisions, but it doesn’t do the decision-making for you.

Agile works well when leadership teams have a strong strategic vision and want to use an agile framework to execute against that vision. Use the framework to validate their hypotheses and discover the best way of achieving that vision.

• How to do great work.

• How to acquire rapid, valuable feedback from customers and stakeholders.

• How to test value propositions.

• How to improve time-to-market.

• How to reduce production costs and wastage.

And so forth.

You develop the ‘why’ and scrum can help you discover what to do and how to do it best.

If you are clear about the outcomes that you are trying to achieve, and what the next best investment of your time and money is, then scrum will help you figure out how to solve the most compelling problems and develop the most valuable solutions.

Scrum will help you create and develop highly professional, creative, and collaborative product development teams that can organize around the delivery of the outcomes that matter most to you.

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