How do our Nice People work?
At niceshops, personal responsibility, independent work and flexibility are key. We have it ingrained in our DNA, that everyone is a part of the Nice Family and makes an essential contribution to the big picture through their ideas. Each link in the chain has its part to play.
We put people first, whether they are customers or employees. It is particularly important to us that everyone can be themselves, does not have to pretend and can thus fully blossom. All these principles can be united in a simpley way – through agile working.
What is Agile Working?
Due to constant changes and further developments, it is necessary to be flexible and able to act quickly as a development team. This is why classic project management makes little sense in this area. The agile way of working questions all areas of classic project management and focuses on the essentials.
These four core values form the basis for agile working:
- People and interactions are more important than processes and tools
- Functioning software is more important than comprehensive documentation
- Cooperation with the customer is more important than contract negotiations
- Responding to change is more important than following a plan
Due to the high flexibility, the renunciation of lengthy negotiations and unnecessarily elaborate documentation as well as the constant exchange with the customer, it is possible to create software much more efficiently.
We have decided to work with Scrum. Scrum is a framework for agile processes and provides structures to promote the successful use of agile project management.
How is Scrum implemented?
The Scrum team is divided into three roles:
- Scrum Master –> the moderator and mediator
- Product Owner –> the one inbetween customer wish and developer capacitiy
- Developer Team –> the ones who know how to get the customer wish into reality
The heart of Scrum is the sprint, a period of one month in which a product is completed. A sprint is divided into start, work and end.
At the start, the product owner defines the goals from the customers point of view and prioritizes them according to urgency. Subsequently, the complexity and the effort of the implementation is estimated by the development team.
During the work phase, the team is in constant communication with each other as well as with the customer. This ensures that no work is duplicated or done unnecessarily. This exchange takes place during the Daily Scrum, which serves as a daily ten-minute exchange of information about the past and the present day.
At the end of each sprint, the results of the current sprint are analyzed and the next steps are discussed. First, the focus is placed purely on the product and improvements are sought. Afterwards, we reflect on how we can work even more efficiently as a Scrum team and which problems may have impaired productivity. Here, the Scrum Master is also asked to support the team and to look for practices as well as to identify improvements that will be applied in the next step.
They Key Factor: Self-Determined Work
Through the application of Scrum, it is possible for us as individuals to quickly and easily integrate into the collective and take responsibility. If you prefer self-determined work to simply following instructions, if you want to finally escape the hamster wheel and embark on a journey instead, you are in the very best company in our family.
