Written by Cynthia Subroto, MBA YP 58
On Monday, 28th October 2019, Ms. Maharani Asri Rahayu as Associate Product Manager of one of the unicorn start-ups in Indonesia, Bukalapak, came to MBA ITB as a guest lecture in People In Organization class to share about Scrum implementation and practice. Ms. Maharani or usually called Ms. Rani, opened the class with short introduction about herself and the explanation about Scrum.
Scrum is a step by step management framework which can make sure that a new product that will be launched will be the best product and could adapt with the changes. Big companies usually use Waterfall framework in order to launch new product. However, this method has been abandoned because it is considered ineffective since there is a big plan to prepare the product and the product will be fully launched in the end. “How if the product is not liked by customers or inappropriate for customers’ need? While in Scrum method, product is launched in stages, starting with a prototype product. If the product is accepted by the market, then it will be proceeded to the next stage,” said Ms. Rani.
She also explained about how to do Scrum. The first thing to do is deciding the development team that consists of product owner, Scrum master, and development team. The next is Scrum event which deciding things to do in one sprint. Sprint is a time-box of one month or less to create a potentially releasable product. After the product is done, the sprint results will be reviewed. Ms. Rani gave example about how she implemented Scrum in her company. “Almost every start-up are using Scrum because it is flexible and can help company adapt with the changes of market,” she added.
The next activity was followed by directly implementing the practice of Scrum method to build a city using Lego. The class was divided into three groups and one person of each group would be the Scrum master. There were three sprints done and each sprint was conducted with different time and target in accordance with the explanation by Ms. Rani. After finishing all the process, each group presented the results of Scrum to the whole class. They had their own concept for the city they had made that was different with each other.
Although the Scrum method taught in the class were only the “skin” or the introductions, the students felt that this method was very interesting and would be useful for their respective businesses in the future.