Business Adoption of Scrum?

 

I've come accross some items recently, that seem to indicate an adoption or recognition of Scrum beyond software development and to general business management practices.  Below is a webcast for a Scrum conference with Jeff Sutherland speaking about how he discovered Scrum:

He mentions the discovery though a paper written by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka that I wrote an article for on this site.  But more interestingly is the initiative he mentions by Harvard Business School to include a cirriculum to teach Scrum to MBA students.

This is not surprising given the ridiculously fast pace of the information technology industry for which Scrum is applied and had its origins in.  But given the heavy reliance on these technological innovations (think of recent trends such as mobile, social media, cloud computing, etc.) by organizations all over the globe, their pace of acquiring and losing marketshare, churing out new products and keeping up with customer expectations has been just as brisk.

So it is no surprise that I also found this Forbes article by a well know business author Steve Denning, who writes about his discovery of Scrum when asking the question of how to combine rapid innovation with disciplined execution:

At the time, I was working on a book focused on resolving an old management conundrum: how do you combine rapid innovation with disciplined execution? I was proceeding by asking people if they knew about any such workplaces where this was already happening.

I surprised to find that an unusually high proportion of the workplaces that I heard about were in software development. Initially I didn’t pay it any attention. After all, these were geeks, and they talked in a strange, barely comprehensible vocabulary. What could I possibly learn about management from people who had, I imagined, gone into computing because they preferred machines to people?

A colleague, Hans Samios, a manager at Intergraph Corporation in Alabama, contacted me and suggested that I check out what was happening in software development firms, under the names of Agile and in particular, the practices known as Scrum. I had never heard of Scrum, but I decided to check it out.

He gives a brief overview and talks about the well known failures of Scrum (which is typically due to not having a deep understanding of the organizational culture change needed and the very human oriented nature of this process) and mentions the turnaround and 41% sustained growth by SalesForce.com after adopting and implementing Scrum.

These developments are interesting and show that the techniques and best practices within IT project management are starting to get recognition with the wider business audience that it deserves.