In an earlier post, titled “The Fast and the Furious – SCRUM“, I talked about how I had discovered that there is another way of doing a project than following a waterfall approach. And this new way was called SCRUM.
Yeah – I thought a scrum was something that a bunch of large men did while disputing ownership over a small oval ball. Well, turns out that, actually, there is actually a connection.
In 1986, two Japanese business experts (Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka) published a paper in which they describe the (then) current product development process to be similar to a relay race with one group of functional specialists passing the baton to the next group.
What Takeuchi and Nonaka proposed was a different method where “a team tries to go the distance as a a unit – passing the ball back and forth”.
And this was the basis of what we know call the SCRUM methodology og project management.
You can read their paper here.
Other Great Links
- The New New Product Development Game
- Conversation with Ikujiro Nonaka
- An Introduction to SCRUM
- The SCRUM papers
Related articles
- Rugby and the origins of agile (lunatractor.com)
- Goodbye Prince II? – Raise a DP4 for the last time (chrisdixon.net)
Hi Mark,
Have you tried to manage a project yet with Scrum? If yes, then what were your results?
Lately, it seems that there is this movement to replace Scrum with Kanban, read more about this here: http://www.pmhut.com/scrum-vs-kanban
I’ve primarily been involved with Prince II projects so far. While this approach is great for “sure” things (e.e. motorways, office buildings), there are time when a bit mor e”agility” is required.
I’m definitely interested in learning more about other methodologies, so thanks for the link. I’ll take a look at it.