Scrum is one of the most widely used Agile processes in the US and around the world. Why is this? First of all, Scrum is easy to adopt because it makes sense to development teams and empowers them to deliver value through software products. And, it's also a very practical approach in that it does not prescribe specific development techniques and so it can be adopted by companies with a range of legacy processes and tools in place. From software vendors to corporate IT organizations to offshore consultancies, teams using Scrum are successful in delivering valuable software faster.
Ken Schwaber opens his book, Agile Project Management with Scrum, by stating that Scrum is a "most perplexing and paradoxical process for managing complex projects." Scrum is an amazingly simple and straightforward process to learn, yet it is a framework and set of practices-not a prescriptive process- for managing teams. Thus, it requires that teams use common sense and do not fall back on more traditional styles of team management. By providing a series of case studies and lessons learned by companies using Scrum, this book offers a wide range of techniques for teams looking to change the way they develop and deliver
Advertisement
software, and truly maximize their return on investment.
Recently, Ken has seen some interesting changes in the way in which companies are adopting Scrum:
Scrum Moves From Grassroots To A Management Choice For its first fourteen years in existence, most Scrum implementations were bottom up. That is, a development team would start using Scrum. Its customer would see working software at the end of one month. They would be so overjoyed that they would tell a fellow manager. The fellow manager would ask his or her development team why they weren't using Scrum. That team would shift. Team by team, customer by customer, the organization would transform itself to use Scrum and become agile.Over the last eighteen months, I have been seeing top-down implementations of Scrum. A "C" level executive looks to Scrum for competitive advantage and directs its use throughout the organization. This top level support is invaluable for securing the authority required to make this type of change happen and stick. Although I am under NDA for most of these organizations, visible organizations using top-down implementations include CapitalOne, KeyBank, Yahoo, Covad, Siemens Medical, and Siemens Telecommunications. The paradox presented by top-down implementations is that Scrum and all agile processes depend on self-managing teams, the exact opposite of most top-down directives. It will be fascinating to see how well top management executes these directives.
Ken Schwaber is one of the founders of the Agile Alliance, a signatory to the Agile Manifesto, and a founder of the Scrum Alliance. Co-developer of the Agile Scrum process with Jeff Sutherland in 1990, Ken has worked with numerous organizations to help them take advantage of Scrum and trained or helped others train over 3,000 Scrum project managers. Ken has been developing software for over thirty years.
Spotlight 
Scrum is one of the most widely used Agile processes in the US and around the world. Why is this? First of all, Scrum is easy to adopt because it makes sense to development teams and empowers them to deliver value through software products. And, it's also a very practical approach in that it does not prescribe specific development techniques and so it can be adopted by companies with a range of legacy processes and tools in place. From software vendors to corporate IT organizations to offshore consultancies, teams using Scrum are successful in delivering valuable software faster.
