Scrum- are there actually any rugby balls to be seen?

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
  • Scrum and Kanban
  • Agile software development methodologies and how to apply them.
  • Scrum
  • A father of Scrum meets a grandfather of Scrum in Japan
  • Using Scrum in real-world game production
  • Rugby and the origins of agile (lunatractor.com)
  • Goodbye Prince II? – Raise a DP4 for the last time (chrisdixon.net)
    1. PM Hut 11/01/2012
      • markjowen 11/01/2012

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