I struggled in the past when people were asking me to explain Scrum quickly and without putting metaphor and success stories. Mostly people from business, when I was asking them to explore why they must know. I was like, how is it possible? They just wanted to know the essential elements of Scrum and process flow. I learned how to teach in less than 10 mins to generate interest, and the rest is continuous learning. Earlier, I was giving them a lot more analogy like football vs. rugby (moving ball but moving unit). However, these analogies were time taking and sometimes confused people as they get deeper in explaining game first understanding the Scrum framework.
Why I agreed to teach in less than 10 mins?
Because the majority of them had a very usual answer – "Hey Naveen, I know it is something to do with the software team, but I am not part of it." You know if someone doesn't show interest, then getting time to discuss further is also tricky. It was vital for me to teach in the first meeting itself instead of asking to schedule another appointment for the same. 😊
What was I going to teach them in less than 10 mins or 5 mins? It was not very easy to discuss and explain, so I was carrying a notepad and pencil to quickly draw, while teaching to make them understand how it works. This approach has helped me a lot in guiding how the framework works. After years of drawing on paper, I am putting the same drawing here in the video for reusability. Also, to share this with people who wanted to know how Scrum works.
For the last three years, I have been working more closely with product management, underwriting, risk & compliance, marketing, sales, human resource, supply chain, operation, quality, and audit compare to software development. This kind of quick explanation helps me to generate interest for further discussion. It also helps me in teaching Scrum Master and Product Owner classes.
I have covered only essential elements of scrum and purpose for those elements. If you find it useful, then feel free to share and subscribe to our YouTube channel to deep dive into all these essential elements of the Scrum framework.