Scrum

Scrum is an iterative incremental process of software development commonly used with agile software development. Despite the fact that "Scrum" is not an acronym, some companies implementing the process have been known to adhere to an all capital letter expression of the word, i.e. SCRUM. This may be due to one of Ken Schwaber's early papers capitalizing SCRUM in the title.

Although Scrum was intended to be for management of software development projects, it can be used in running software maintenance teams, or as a program management approach.

Characteristics of Scrum

Scrum is a process skeleton that includes a set of practices and predefined roles. The main roles in Scrum are the ScrumMaster who maintains the processes and works similarly to a project manager, the Product Owner who represents the stakeholders, and the Team which includes the developers.

During each sprint, a 15-30 day period (length decided by the team), the team creates an increment of potentially shippable (usable) software. The set of features that go into each sprint come from the product backlog, which is a prioritized set of high level requirements of work to be done. Which backlog items go into the sprint is determined during the sprint planning meeting. During this meeting the Product Owner informs the team of the items in the product backlog that he wants completed. The team then determines how much of this they can commit to complete during the next sprint.During the sprint, no one is able to change the sprint backlog, which means that the requirements are frozen for a sprint.

There are several implementations of systems for managing the Scrum process which range from yellow stickers and white-boards to software packages. One of Scrum's biggest advantages is that it is very easy to learn and requires little effort to start using.

Scrum as a marketing project management methodology

As marketing is often executed in project-based manner, a lot of generic project management principles apply to marketing. Marketing can be also optimized similar to project management techniques. Scrum approach to marketing is believed to be helpful for overcoming problems experienced by marketing executives. Short and regular meetings are important for small marketing teams, as every member of a team has to know what the others are working on and what direction the whole team is moving in. Scrum in marketing makes it possible to:

• See possible problems at early stages and allows coping with them quicker and with minimal losses. According to the key principle of Scrum “no problems are swept under the carpet? every team member is encouraged to describe the difficulties he is experiencing, as this might influence the work of the whole group.
• Reduce financial risk. With the beginning of every sprint period, the business owner can change any of the marketing project parameters without penalty, including increasing investments to enlarge consumers ?quantity, reducing investments until unknowns are mitigated, or financing other initiatives.
• Make marketing planning flexible. Short-term marketing plans based on sprints can be much more effective. Marketing managers get an opportunity to switch from one promotion method to another, if the first one proved to be unsuccessful during the sprint period. It also becomes easier to clarify due dates of every small, but important, task to each member of a team.
• Involve clients in various ways.

There’s also a tendency to execute Scrum in marketing with the help of Enterprise 2.0 technologies and Project management 2.0 tools.