Scrum in Wrike: making software development more agile

We keep telling you that Wrike is very flexible and easily adjusts to your needs. We told you how you can make your project management mobile with your Blackberry or PDA phone. We also wrote a guide about getting things done with Wrike to make your days more productive.

Here we’ll tell you how to use Wrike for the Scrum method, which is gaining popularity with project managers nowadays.

The Scrum approach to managing projects is becoming more and more popular. A small, cross-functional team can be much more mobile and agile in producing the best possible results in delivering a project. The Scrum method is based on daily meetings, during which every team member reports on what he has done since the last meeting, notes whether there are any problems and says what he is going to do until the next meeting. This makes management more adaptive to emerging circumstances. Scrum is now successfully applied in various spheres from marketing and finance to medical products development. But first of all, Scrum is applied to management of software development projects.

As a lightweight process, Scrum complements agile management practices and makes the process of software project delivery more efficient. But can Scrum be even more agile? Yes, if you use Wrike.

With Wrike support, Scrum practices make the team even more productive and reduce project delivery terms dramatically.

Customers become a part of the development team: In Wrike you can share your project workspace with your clients so that they can follow every step of the team’s progress and add something on the go.

The whole work process is transparent: The tasks on the project are shared among all the team members, Scrum master, stakeholders and clients, so that interested parties know who is responsible for what.

Reports on accomplishments and commitments: In Wrike, the workflow process is reflected in detail. When a task is marked completed by any of the team members, all the others get an immediate e-mail notification and can move the project further ahead. There are also e-mail notifications when task attributes are changed by anybody in the team, like when somebody adds comments, attaches files etc. Team members get a chance to quickly react when they are able to promptly receive the necessary information.

Development team can contribute directly to project plans: In Wrike, each team member can update his plan. All the other members of the team, as well as clients and stakeholders, will be instantly notified of any changes in the project work.

Flexible workplace: Wrike is a web-based service, so project developers can work from any computer with an internet connection. Moreover, they can create and manage tasks just by sending e-mails. So when members of the team are separated by great distances, Wrike still makes Scrum-like process possible.

Quick timeline make Scrum planning easier. Wrike allows you to get an overview of the whole project and see who is working on which part of software development. It’s also possible to see what every team member is planning to do next.

Wrike is indispensable when projects overlap and developers, Scrum masters or stakeholders participate in several projects. In Wrike, you share different projects with different people and can always quickly find out where any of your projects stand.

With multiple overlapping projects, it is vital to get business-value products fast. Scrum methodology allows you to get this product much earlier than the traditional “waterfall” management method. With Wrike support, Scrum helps you to get the best project value in the shortest possible time. If Wrike is a platform for Scrum iterative and incremental practices in your team, you save hours on reporting. Wrike gives every team member an opportunity to be aware of all the changes in the project before the daily meeting. So you go straight to discussion of possible issues.

Scrum in Wrike makes the work on a project less bureaucratic and more productive. We developed Wrike to help everybody involved in a project’s development easily communicate and collaborate to move this project ahead faster, bringing more immediate business value to you and your partners.