Originally posted on LinkedIn

I didn’t get Scrum either when I started moving away from project management to complexity management. My “Aha” moment came when I realized the difference between the approaches, and neither was “right or wrong” giving the appropriate context.

To help you “get Scrum”, a good starting point is at Scrum.org. They have the Scrum guide available to download from the website. Scrum is more about mindset and behavior than specific direction on how to build products and services. It shifts away from the industrial approach of telling people what to build and how to build it toward creating solutions for complex problems. It was challenging to understand at the beginning, but now I get it since we used similar behaviors and mindsets in the military. 

Traditional project management has constraints on budget, scope and time versus Scrum which has constraints on time (Sprint duration) and team size (scope). In Scrum, team size then becomes the budget and scope constraint since you know how much the team costs and the team size (3 to 9 Development Team members) determines how much work can be done within the time constraint. As well the team knows some requirements for the work to be done up front and is also identifying new requirements in the process of solving the problems presented with in the time box. The emergent requirements may be included in the current Sprint or added the plan for a future Sprint.

For complicated projects where the requirements are understood and the processes for building the products or services are defined, project management works well. For example, building a car or a computer network are complicated efforts. There are basic, predefined blocks involved that are self-evident to an extent and are repeatable without much change or deviation from defined patterns of production. 

Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham explain the project and product mindsets in their book, “The Professional Product Owner.”  I recommend reading Chapter 1 to gain a better understanding how the mindsets compare.

Curveball concept

There’s an interesting cross-over between intangible and tangible products that impacts project management and product and service development.

Once an intangible element (like software), that is more idea than physical object is introduced, that’s where project management begins encounter challenges due to increased complexity. As more products and services are based on a foundation of software and systems we move from the complicated and (mostly) known to the complex and unknown. Dave Snowden had put time and effort into explaining how this work and developed the Cynefin framework to help make sense of complicated and complex work.

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