designers are expected to know how to work according to agile methods, the most popular being scrum. However, this so-called agile organization model has some weaknesses and is often badly used.

Scrum is old.
The scrum was imagined and named in 1986 by Hirotaka Takeuchi, professor of management at Harvard in the article “The New Product Development Game”.

Scrum is heavy.
Paradoxically, scrum requires the implementation of a rigorous administration to work. While the method is initially designed to work with groups of about ten people, it is necessary to have a full-time scrum master who will make sure that we do not stray from good practices and will sell the interest of scrum to the team members.

It is also necessary to have a product owner who is the voice of the company and the customers to decide which projects to prioritize to maximize the value of the product.

In addition to these two internal roles, daily meetings, continuous updating of the backlog, end-of-sprint practice reviews, etc. are necessary.

Scrum doesn’t distinguish designers.
The roles in the scrum are product owner, scrum master, and developers. The developer team also includes designers, testers, and statisticians.

The role of design has grown since scrum was created, making it a sub-category of development is therefore quite limiting.

It is not uncommon for companies practicing scrum to be unsure of where to place designers in the organization. Some decide to create a separate design team but managed by the same scrum master as the developers; some include the designers with the developers at the risk of making the daily exchanges uninteresting; some create autonomous teams of designers who then have their PO and SM.

Companies claiming to be agile are no longer exceptional. The job market for designers is now all about that. One would almost forget what the non-agile methods used until now are.

As a reminder, these are the waterfall and V methods.

The waterfall model comes from industrial-military design and proposes that each step be sequential. One does not move on to the development phase until the previous phases are 100% finished.

According to the author of the methodology, the point of sequencing was to give a divided objective between specializations. The designers do not work with the developers, each one works on his own in his creation phase.

The V-model was inspired by the waterfall model and added a bottom-up phase after coding consisting of a series of tests. The components of the system are tested independently of each other, then the whole is tested in integration and one last time as a complete system.

Non-agile methods are still used today in industrial design and sometimes in application design. Their main flaw is that there is little room for the unknown or for adding new features during development. The first phases are used to frame the project and are definitive. If we realize that something is wrong, iteration is not possible and we have to go back.

Faced with the uncertain world in which product, industrial, or IT design projects evolve, a group of 17 experts wrote the agile manifesto in 2001 laying the foundations of agile organizations through 12 points

• Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
  through early and continuous delivery
  of valuable software.
• Welcome changing requirements, even late in
  development. Agile processes harness change for
  the customer’s competitive advantage.
• Deliver working software frequently, from a
  a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a
  preference to the shorter timescale.
• Business people and developers must work
  together daily throughout the project.
• Build projects around motivated individuals.
  Give them the environment and support they need,
  and trust them to get the job done.
• The most efficient and effective method of
  conveying information to and within a development
  the team is face-to-face conversation.
• Working software is the primary measure of progress.
• Agile processes promote sustainable development.
  The sponsors, developers, and users should be able
  to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
• Continuous attention to technical excellence
  and good design enhances agility.
• Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount
  of work not done — is essential.
• The best architectures, requirements, and designs
  emerge from self-organizing teams.
• At regular intervals, the team reflects on how
  to become more effective then tunes and adjusts
  its behavior accordingly.

This manifesto is the basis for scrum, but also for other less common agile methods such as extreme programming or crystal clear, which also consist of iterative cycles and collaboration between team members.

The fact that scrum has become the default agile organization model in companies certainly reflects a simplification of the concept of agility. Leaders and managers do not need to understand the issues of agility if they have a framework that seems to work for others.

The main limitation of scrum lies in this lack of understanding of the concepts. It is not uncommon for teams to end up deviating from the strict methodologies of scrum and returning to a more sequential model. The roles of product owner and scrum master are sometimes offered to team members who cannot dedicate themselves 100% to them. Some teams have atypical profiles that do not fit in well with the developers.

Scrum is a good framework that favors iteration and collaboration. This method poses a few problems, particularly regarding the documentation of iterations and the role that can be assigned to new profiles.

Giving a rigid and unique framework to agility doesn’t make sense as in two situations, two companies will have to face different problems and will therefore have to show intelligence and agility in different ways.

After 36 years of existence, it would be interesting to question the scrum and to propose a new methodology taking up the principles of the agile manifesto which would be more adapted to the new emerging professions and more inclusive for the professions of design, analysis, and administration. All agile methodologies have been designed in the context of industrial or software development by software engineers. Designing a new methodology imagined by designers to maximize user-centered design is a challenge that will have to be met in the coming years.