Scrum for designers / Making work better
From the outside, the architecture industry seems glamorously creative - putting pen to paper, crafting majestic houses, wowing clients with dream homes. On the inside however, there’s a lot less glamour and a lot more logistics. At nearly every stage of the design process, external dependencies need to be met: council approvals, consultant reports, contractor quotes, and of course, client responses. It’s these dependencies that make it difficult to answer one of the key questions from prospective clients - how long will this take?
Wanting to give our clients a more realistic timeline and delivery date led us to work with an Agile coach to introduce elements of a practice more common in the software development industry: Scrum. If you work for, or have been exposed to, a modern corporate business you’ll likely have heard of the term Scrum and/or Agile. Scrum was developed by a couple of IT geeks who wanted to give the industry a lightweight framework to manage complex knowledge work and the ability to respond to ever-changing conditions. Essentially, a way to improve efficiency and quality, and make work better.
We use a physical Kanban board (an approach born from Japan’s motor industry in the late 40s) to track the progress of work during a sprint (a time boxed period of work - in our case, two weeks). We hold short, daily stand-ups where each person shares what they did the previous day, what they’re planning to work on that day, and raises any issues they need help with. The board gives everyone a view of all the work in progress so we can identify when things get stuck or aren’t moving, issues are raised early, and the collective wisdom of our team helps resolve them so work can continue.
Each project is broken down into manageable chunks, giving our designers the mental freedom to focus on what needs to be done at that point in time. It also means clients have some certainty and transparency as to how their work is progressing. As time goes on, more certainty can be given on the final delivery date.
Another ceremony Altereco pinched from Scrum is the retrospective: a regular time at the end of every sprint when the team downs tools, grabs a beer, and reflects on the period of work that just happened (we’ve even been known to hold hands and chant “Sprint 18, Sprint 18” - but that’s usually just to wind up the newbies!). From that conversation, we identify and agree on things to try next sprint. It has given our team a dedicated space to come together and collectively find ways to improve on what and how we do things.
Many businesses are adopting Agile frameworks to help them work better. At Altereco, using elements of Scrum and Kanban has given us a system to better manage our projects, gives our clients more clarity around the progress of their designs, and affords our team more time to be glamorously creative.