Agile and Scrum for non-IT projects

Scott Theus

It’s no secrets that I am a big fan of working in Scrums (I’m a CSM, so I may be biased, but oh well.) I’ve used Scrum teams for software development, of course, but I’ve also used them for hardware development, corss-functional teams with hardware, software, networking, etc. for ATM development, and several others. WIth a little luck, I may be applying Scrum and other Agile practices to non-IT teams like Marketing, Legal, Purchasing, etc. 

I’m interested to hear how others have applied Scrum and/or Agile to non-IT projects. Does anyone have examples they’s Be willing to share?

 

-Scott

 

Davin Studer

We recently started using Scrum in out IT shop. We are not a development shop. Sure it is easy to see how Scrum work with development practices, but like I said we don't develop anything. So for us the hurdle was to pivot some of the terminology and once we did that we were able to start to see how it could work with our department. I thin the biggest thing for us was that Scrum is typically based around a product with a product owner. At first we thought, "Well we don't make any products, so is Scrum going to work for us?" But then as we thought about it we realized that our product is the services that we provide to the organization. Things such as desktop support, Anti-Virus, Citrix app/desktop delivery, server up-time, etc. So, for us it was asking the question what processes do we do that add value to the organization and that becomes our product.

So, for an HR department I could maybe see things such as on-boarding being Scrum worthy with the sprint length corresponding to how often you have new employee orientation. If your HR department does it more ad hoc then they may need to change to offering it on a cadence such as weekly or bi-weekly.

So, I guess the biggest thing that found helpful is just asking what value do you add to your organization. That is your product and how can you organize work for that product into a regular and repeatable cadence.