Scram, Scrum!

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Agile   Applications Delivery   Information Technology   Integration Management   Scrum  

How do you increase corporate stress and make a difficult job even tougher? For one firm I worked for, you introduce an agile software development methodology.

Regardless of the project management approach you might take at your own firm, changing the core of how you make your business work is certainly not something you should take lightly. Even if research is done, studies performed and use cases examined, you better make sure that making this kind of move is the right one--especially if you are moving to agile.

Software development is often fraught with deadlines that come screaming together in a convoluted mess to make a deliverable happen. On occasion, there are delays, compromises, negotiation and, unfortunately, failures. Anxiety and strain on the job is normal, but in the process of using Scrum it is common to find product development groups and senior management going head to head.

Spring Forward, Fall Back
One problem is that Scrum teams frequently and mistakenly believe that they must fit their work into a period that is only four weeks long or less. While many agile teams establish an “ideal” timeframe upon themselves of this approximate period, restricting projects to this short a term is not a true necessity. Just as the old saying goes “How do you eat an elephant?” (the reply being “One bite at a time”), really…

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