(Original creator: JorgeNunez)
Congratulations to Max Verstappen on winning the Malaysian Grand Prix last weekend. You see, strategy pays out when everything falls into place.
So, my drive 😉 is to apply scrum in your business strategy to win the race too.
So in F1 the pit stop, besides being a masterly synchronized ballet of disciplined execution and expertise, the pit stop is used strategically by the team to win the race. How? The amount of pit stops depends on the desired lap time while gauging fuel consumption, tire wearing out, undercutting (taking over a car while making the pit stop or leaving one). With the above in mind the team determines to use certain amount of pit stops, or to add one more in order to win.
In SCRUM terms, the sprints are the perfectly synchronized production of software which can be strategically used to deliver value to our customers. Whether we deliver features gradually or change the order of delivery as to meet business value.
Here at Uniface, we are busy trying to get SCRUM to the next level where alignment between business and IT are essential to make a difference. We must be aligned to adapt to change and therefore better serve our customers. In that context, we already have a track record as we have been using SCRUM for more than 9 years and have done the necessary improvements to the processes ourselves.
As an example, we have even invented our own ceremony to facilitate the alignment among teams called a Sprint Pitch (an already 3-year-old ceremony for us).
To stress why aligning the business with IT is important, I want to emphasize the analogy from the F1 championships; I was inspired to use it when watching a Red Bull documentary about https://www.redbull.com/int-en/tv/video/AP-1P5DU67BD1W11/the-history-of-the-pit-stop” during my last flight.
You know the thrill of changing tires and refueling the car in the shortest amount of time possible?
In the early days, the pit stop was just a pause that took up to a minute, there was no changing of tires. That came in the 1970’s when an unplanned pit stop to change tires would take 3 to 5 minutes. In the early 1980’s Gordon Murray turned them into the strategic pit stops, considering the car weight, the tire degradation and saw a relation on how all that influenced lap times. At that moment another race began, the one to bring the pit stop’s time down to the minimum. In order, to use the pit stop more strategically and make the time necessary for a pit stop
Well, it is no surprise that to reach the shortest time, it took analysis, collaboration, improvements to get to the changing of the tires or better even the entire wheel set and refueling the car, cooling the car’s engine in just under 2 seconds. Bear in mind that actually it takes a crew of 18 to 20 highly skilled individuals to handle a pit stop.
You may wonder how do we do that in SCRUM at Uniface, but first time for a pit stop … (to be continued)!