How SCRUM could be applied to a team responsible for various projects?

Question

I work in a team of 8 people and today it receives demands from several stakeholders, some development demands, others operational. When there is development, it is usually done by one person of the team only, and in several situations this model is harmful, for example, when there is exchange in team members.

I've been looking to apply SCRUM, but due to the inability to cease various demands we've received, I'm having difficulty visualizing how SCRUM can be applied. Anyone who has ever had a similar situation could share their experience with SCRUM methodology applied in this context?

Answer 1

some development demands, others operational

I believe that the Kanban model would be more appropriate for your scenario, because you have tasks that require immediate action, and your scope seems to be defined on-the-fly. Even your development tasks seem to be somewhat like a support ticket, which is assigned to one person that will be working on it until it's done.

The Scrum is not appropriate here because:

• You have multiple kinds of demands (development but also operational);
• Your scope is not previously defined (operational demands happen on-the-fly), which make it difficult for you to actually have a backlog, and to plan small deliveries for it;
• Difficulty to paralellize your demands; Eg: in scrum you have Stories, which need to be planned and be assigned an effort (story points), then you can put your entire team working on sub-tasks within these stories in order to deliver them faster;
• in scrum you need collaboration from the customer too; for defining all the possible stories (what the customer wants, which compose the product backlog), and for gradually prioritizing them as the project goes;

EDIT: in my opinion, you could try to:

• Separate the development tasks from the operational;
• For operational tasks, use the Kanban approach and specify a team allocated for it;
• For development, you should educate your stakeholders to work and collaborate with you using the Scrum methodology, and also allocate a team for this;