Agile in Nonprofits Agile in Nonprofits

Scrum is a uniform approach to doing work, assigning work in teams, and iterating work successfully during a long period of time. Scrum is an Agile framework.

One of the best places to start if you are interested in learning about Scrum is to read the book by Jeff Sutherland and JJ Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. This book outlines the background of scrum and provides you with the basic concepts you will be implementing in your organization. You can also start by downloading and reading The Scrum Guide which is available at no charge at: Scrum Alliance

You don’t detail all the work, but you size it. Then if your team has a velocity, you can estimate how many sprints it will take to complete. If you don’t have a velocity, you won’t know until you start. So in this case, don’t over plan, but rather, get started as quickly as possible.

Ideally, a person should only be on one team at a time. The projects they are part of should prioritized and they should focus on completing one at a time.

You should focus on defining smaller slices aligned with your workflow versus layers. Layers are a distinct element of your product or service. For example, a draft of an entire grant application is a slice, but a layer is a fully drafted and edited section of a grant application.