Scrum, and agile development in general, is a fairly major trend throughout the development sphere, but it is usually adopted to increase flexibility and the ability to rapidly resolve issues.
There is a fairly good chance, however, that Agile development strategies can save a business money through two avenues: increased return on investment, and improved risk management.
The tangible benefits of Scrum development
While the risk avoidance we will mention later on has largely intangible benefits, Scrum can have a tangible effect as well, improving efficiency and increasing ROI.
As with any other paradigm shift, moving toward a scrum-focused development strategy will have some setup costs, such as Scrum Master Training in Dublin from a firm like https://www.althris.com/. After this initial period, however, there are substantial benefits through two improvements: quality and efficiency.
Quality is important. A higher-quality product commands some combination of higher price and increased demand, driving up the bottom line regardless of the approach the business chooses.
Scrum-based development really shines in efficiency gains, however, with teams being much more able to switch between tasks, letting them effectively handle difficult client demands, multiple simultaneous projects, and a general improvement in development speed, with an estimated 63 per cent advantage over more planned development given a constant cost.
Agile strategies and risk avoidance
Regardless of the development strategy, there will always be risks involved. There can be modifications to the original business case, ongoing support and late-stage bug fixing, and changing customer requirements, all of which will take up resources.
The same flexibility that sees Scrum having a substantial efficiency advantage over heavily planned approaches gives it far more ability to handle unplanned issues when they do arise.
Scrums are used to changing their focus rapidly and regularly, so having a Scrum spend a cycle focusing on adding a newly requested feature doesn’t cause anything to grind to a halt. Similarly, ongoing support for products can be gracefully interwoven with current projects, allowing immediate bug fixes without leaving a team dedicated to legacy products.
For the vast majority of businesses, return on investment will not be the primary driving factor of adopting a Scrum-based development model, but it isn’t something to be ignored, either. If a business is considering Scrum, tangible bottom line benefits may be enough to convince them to make the jump.
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