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Scrum vs Traditional Project Management Approach in Delivering Value
Posted by SCRUMstudy® on October 13, 2022
Categories: Agile Iterative Development Project Delivery Scrum
Scrum vs. Traditional Project Management Approach in Delivering Value
Before we discuss the Scrum and Traditional approaches assessing and maintaining business justification for a project, let’s understand some of the key differences between these two types of methodologies.
The emphasis in traditional Project Management is to conduct detailed upfront planning for the project with emphasis on fixing the scope, cost, and schedule and managing those parameters. Traditional project management may at times lead to a situation where the plan has succeeded yet the customer is not satisfied.
The Scrum framework is founded on the belief that the knowledge workers of today can offer much more than just their technical expertise, and that trying to fully map out and plan for an ever-changing environment is not efficient. Therefore, Scrum encourages data-based, iterative decision making. In Scrum, the primary focus is on delivering products that satisfy customer requirements in small iterative shippable increments.
Now, let’s discuss how Scrum approach is different from Traditional approaches to deliver value through projects. Scrum aims to deliver the greatest amount of value in the shortest amount of time. Scrum promotes prioritization and Time-boxing over fixing the scope, cost, and schedule of a project. An important feature of Scrum is self-organization, which allows the individuals who are actually doing the work to estimate and take ownership of tasks.
Unlike in Traditional approach, in Scrum projects, extensive long-term planning is not done prior to project execution. Planning is done in an iterative manner before each Sprint. This allows quick and effective response to change, which results in lower costs and ultimately increased profitability and Return on Investment (ROI). Moreover, value-driven delivery (section 4.3) is a key benefit of the Scrum framework and provides significantly better prioritization and quicker realization of business value. Because of the iterative nature of Scrum development, there is always at least one release of the product with Minimum Marketable Features (MMF) available. Even if a project is terminated, there are usually some benefits or value created prior to termination.
