Scrum for Agencies works.

Since we introduced Scrum at The Digitale (before, Kanban was the primary framework), we have taken our workflows to a next level. Here, I want to share some of the biggest advantages for us and our clients, since "agile" is a much discussed topics these days. Maybe it inspires you to think about your own workflows, too.

• You are forced to estimate your effort to solve a task. Time after time you get better with your estimation and planning the projects becomes much more accurate. Estimated times are compared with actually used times in the sprint review at the end of a week, which makes future estimation be based on actual data, not believe.
• When estimating the effort, the whole team is involved, which makes the estimation even better and lets everyone be up to date with the most important tasks of the week. Classic never-ending Monday-meetings with project updates are no more needed.
• Time efficiency gets raised significantly. Since we plan our tasks for one Sprint (which is one week in our case), everyone can plan the week as resilient as possible and knows what to do the upcoming week. There is no risk, that new tasks fly in during the week and mess up your planning. There is no need for overtime and last-minute-overnight-tasks (sounds pretty unconventional for an agency…), when the estimations for the sprint where good.
• We are as transparent as you can be to our clients. Working on Scrum-boards, every clients can get access to these boards with a complete overview of every task, the prioritization, the owner and the timing. No need to send Excel-sheets with timelines by eMail anymore and the client really is a part of the team.
• The Planning and the workflow is consistent for every project. Every request, task or project that is communicated to us until Monday morning, will be estimated and prioritized during our Planning-Meeting. This is the last gate for tasks for this week, there is no way of bringing new tasks to the team during a sprint. This is why the team can work efficiently without being distracted all the time. And clients are compelled to plan a project in advance as well. This often leads to more accurate briefings and plannings. Only exception: real emergency tasks, like “website is down” will of course be prioritized even when a sprint is running.
• There is always something ready at the end of the sprint. Tasks, that are too big for one sprint, are divided into smaller parts, so that they fit in one week. At the end of the sprint everyone has something to show and present in the Sprint-review, which gives the feeling, that you really accomplished something this week, instead of working on one big task for several weeks, without having any experience of success.

These are just some of the main benefits we see, there are of course many more details to Scrum. As often, agile frameworks mostly just work, when they are used correctly. Taking just the convenient parts out of Scrum without also taking the obligations that come with it, will most likely fail.

What are your experiences? What do you think about agile frameworks and Srum in particular?