Where have you witnessed Scrum being used outside of the IT industry?
Scrum is an agile framework that, if applied properly, can boost the efficiency of teamwork. It is known to be versatile enough, so it could be applied in basically any sort of productive teamwork, even beyond IT (e.g. bakeries, government organizations, etc.)
However, I've never ever seen it being used anywhere else other than in software development, therefore I've always been curious if Scrum is actually being used outside of IT somewhere.
Any time I’ve heard of Scrum being implemented, it’s usually a negative thing. I’ve had a few friends where their workplace tries it, and the smart ones usually drop it. The others just lose people instead. Biggest complaint I’ve seen is the daily meetings that 110% could have been an email. I think it just doesn’t get applied “correctly”.
Why we don’t see it elsewhere is it’s not really applicable elsewhere in a lot of ways. I work in healthcare and I do not know how that would be implemented into my job. It’s not like we have team goals or projects even, we’re just out here scanning patient’s and processing their images. I’m sure management has goals but we're so short staffed that I don’t pay any attention to it. I’ve got more important things to worry about than patient satisfaction scores or how many open appointments we have.
Yeah management types hear "daily meetings" and don't realize that scrum meetings are meant to be less than 5 minutes.
"What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? Do you have any blockers?" Done.
I was part of a project that was run on a 5 minute standup and it was wonderful. Everything after that has been bad to awful.
If folks are discussing implementation details during the meeting, it's awful.
We used to have the meeting first thing in the morning.
"What are you doing today?"
"No clue, you decided to have a meeting instead of letting me check my email and Jira responses."
"What are your blockers?"
"No clue, you decided to have a meeting instead of letting me check my email and Jira responses."
One of the former managers wanted me to implement agile programming, as it would be so much better, he had heard. I am the only programmer in my specialized field in the company...
I swear some of these managers don’t even have two brain cells to rub together
I’m in healthcare and education, and find morning huddles are very helpful. We run the patient list, identify who might need us to track some results down, and assign learners to patients they know or who appear to have presentations they should prioritize for their learning. Reception joins to see if any changes are needed to make sure patients have the right amount of time allocated, or if we have room for some squeeze ins. If there are any priority issues (patients we MUST see that day) that gets shared so no matter who gets the call, we are able to react appropriately. Whole thing takes well under 10min, and is hugely helpful.
Some genius added another huddle first thing in the afternoon schedule, which is rather useless, but since we never get to eat lunch, this leaves a bit of time before the chaos of the afternoon strikes to grab a bite or run to the bathroom.
Because a project management framework does not work for operations jobs.
How does Susan and Emma in accounts express their work as a sprint? How does Steve or Sarah running a bakery express their work as a sprint?
Project management does not only apply to IT tho. Some example:
I wouldn't want to live in a house that has been designed using agile methods.
Neither would we want to use software built in such a way, but here we are...
A proper project management framework should work for all types of projects, not just IT.
Steve or Sarah launching a new bread product can make use of the framework. Renovating the bakery can use the framework.
The point is that most of their job duties are operational, not part of a project.
Probably much the same way anything non-trivial gets split into sprints in IT: Just fudge it to keep the PM from moaning too much while you try to actually get some work done in between all the fucking "rituals".
It’s a pretty common term on the rugby pitch.
I had the unpleasant experience of being in a group that applied SCRUM to research. Yes, the work involved software implementation, but research is largely antithetical to SCRUM. Yes, you need good research practices but a key aspect is that you don't know where you will end up. The stand up meetings became 30 minutes twice a week. Arrrg.
I work in IT ... scrum and devops is just some bullshit middle managers made up to justify their existance.
I understand scrum, but DevOps? Are you joking? There's so much benefit to having more cross-functional IT people.
Yeah, you can make fewer people do more jobs.
You can make your team better at more kinds of technology. If management sees that as an opportunity to cut people then that's management being dumb. But DevOps is still fundamentally a good thing.
oh how I would love to see scrum applied to cooking:
chef laughs in everybody wants their food asap
Line cooking is essentially scrum. Each ticket is a story. They are added to the backlog as they come in and added to the sprint when you start cooking.
Rugby.
In education there are self-directed learning centers that follow agile principles with some of the features of SCRUM.
I like using a variation of it to keep track of my projects at home.
We just started using a kanban board with monthly "sprints". We have a backlog of things to choose from. Then we pick out a few that we know we can complete this month. Move them to in progress when we start working on them. Then move them to complete so we have something to "show for it".
I worked for a big commercial real estate company years ago. Think buying and selling whole apartment complexes. We adopted scrum in our IT department, then saw the sales support team start doing it. Each sale was treated like an epic and each task a story. Actually worked pretty well for them.