Scrum is a widely used agile framework designed for managing and completing complex projects through iterative, incremental progress. While its roots lie in software development, Scrum is now employed across industries to drive effective, cross-functional teamwork, accelerate delivery, and foster constant learning and adaptation.
Scrum organises work into short cycles called sprints (typically two to four weeks), with clear deliverables reviewed at the end of each cycle. Teams operate with well-defined roles—Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development Team—each focused on maximising value delivered to the customer. Daily stand-ups, sprint planning, sprint reviews, and retrospectives are core Scrum events, structuring transparency, feedback, and continual improvement.
Key benefits of Scrum include faster delivery, flexibility, enhanced motivation, and frequent opportunities to adapt direction based on stakeholder feedback and market changes. Unlike traditional project management, Scrum embraces evolving requirements and values working solutions over rigid documentation.
Scrum’s methodology is defined by:
- Dedicated roles: Product Owner (prioritises value), Scrum Master (facilitates process), and a Development Team (delivers increments).
- Iterative progress: Organised into sprints, each delivering a potentially shippable product increment.
- Key events: Sprint Planning, Daily Stand-ups, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective, all designed to ensure continuous alignment, transparency, and improvement.
- Minimal but essential artefacts: Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, and Increment—ensuring focus on value rather than exhaustive documentation.
Scrum’s adaptability enables teams to react to change rather than rigidly following a plan, thus reducing time to market, maximising stakeholder engagement, and enhancing team motivation and accountability. Its success relies not on strict adherence to procedures, but on a deep commitment to empirical process control, collaboration, and delivering real value frequently and reliably.
Evolution of Scrum and the Hype Cycle
Scrum’s conceptual origins date to the 1986 Harvard Business Review article “The New New Product Development Game” by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, which likened effective product teams to rugby scrums—dynamic, self-organised, and collaborative. Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales, and Jeff McKenna developed the first practical implementation at Easel Corporation in the early 1990s, while Ken Schwaber independently pursued similar ideas at Advanced Development Methods. Sutherland and Schwaber subsequently collaborated to codify Scrum, publishing the first research paper in 1995 and helping launch the Agile Manifesto in 2001.
Scrum has traversed the hype cycle familiar to many management innovations:
- Innovation and Early Adoption: Initially delivered exceptional results in software teams seeking to escape slow, bureaucratic models.
- High Expectations and Hype: Widespread adoption led to attempts to scale Scrum across entire organisations and sectors—sometimes diluting its impact as rituals overtook outcomes and cargo-cult practices emerged.
- Disillusionment: Pushback grew in some circles, where mechanistic application led to “Scrum-but” (Scrum in name, not practice), highlighting the need for cultural buy-in and adaptation.
- Mature Practice: Today, Scrum is a mature, mainstream methodology. Leading organisations deploy Scrum not as a prescriptive process, but as a framework to be tailored by empowered teams, restoring focus on the values that foster agility, creativity, and sustained value delivery.
Related Strategy Theorist: Jeff Sutherland
Jeff Sutherland is recognised as the co-creator and chief evangelist of Scrum.
Backstory and Relationship to Scrum:
A former US Air Force fighter pilot, Sutherland turned to computer science, leading development teams in healthcare and software innovation. In the early 1990s at Easel Corporation, frustrated by the slow pace and low morale typical of waterfall project management, he sought a radically new approach. Drawing on systems theory and inspired by Takeuchi and Nonaka’s rugby metaphor, Sutherland and his team conceptualised Scrum—a framework where empowered teams worked intensely in short cycles, inspecting progress and adapting continuously.
Sutherland partnered with Ken Schwaber to formalise Scrum and refine its practices, co-authoring the Scrum Guide and helping write the Agile Manifesto in 2001. He has continued to promote Scrum through teaching, consulting, and writing, most notably in his book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.
Biography:
- Education: West Point graduate, PhD in biometrics and statistics.
- Career: US Air Force, medical researcher, technology executive, and entrepreneur.
- Impact: Through Scrum, Sutherland has influenced not only software delivery, but global business management, education, government, and beyond.
Sutherland’s legacy is his relentless pursuit of value and speed in team-based work, matched by his openness to continuous learning—a principle that remains at the heart of Scrum’s enduring relevance.Scrum is a structured agile framework designed for collaborative, iterative project management—delivering work in short, time-boxed cycles called sprints, typically lasting two to four weeks. While originally created for software development, Scrum has been successfully adapted for broad use in product management, service delivery, and cross-functional teamwork across virtually every sector. The core of Scrum is to empower a small, self-organising, cross-functional team to incrementally build value, adapt quickly to new information, and continuously inspect and improve both the work and the working process.
