Scrum for the Rest of Us

Brian M. Rabon, CST, PMP is the President of The Braintrust Consulting Group, a worldwide leader in agile transformations. Throughout his 17 years of IT industry experience, he has applied agile methods in order to successfully deliver working product to his customers.

  Scrum   ProjectsAtWork  

Few project management practitioners haven’t heard about Scrum by now, but many of those outside the software development arena are still seeking guidance about if and how its core concepts can help them avoid roadblocks and improve project outcomes. Here is a primer on the essence of what makes Scrum tick.

Many of us are used to working in a more traditional, plan-driven environment. When we develop a new product, we first meet with our stakeholders and gather requirements. We then review those requirements and decide which ones to build, or baseline our scope. Next, we meet with our team to plan the development effort. Once everyone agrees to the plan, we start executing the plan and monitoring and controlling the progress along the way. In the end, we deliver the finished product to the stakeholder to their delight and all live happily ever after, right? 

Unfortunately our product development efforts rarely, if ever, go this smoothly. It seems that our stakeholders don’t really know what they want or change their minds halfway through. When this happens, it interrupts the team’s flow and we have to re-plan. Or perhaps the team encounters a technical difficulty while building some feature and they get behind schedule. I am sure that we have all had some type of product development failure in the past and the reasons are too numerous to name here.

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