2011 Agile Conference Why Scrum works A case study from an agile distributed project in Denmark and India Lene Pries-Heje Jan Pries-Heje 資工碩二 張嘉偉 INTRODUCTION • Driven by increasing time-to-market pressure as well as cost saving incentives, more and more software projects are becoming global [cf. 1] with project participants distributed in different places. This means that work is being done by anyone who does it better, cheaper, or faster. It also means that a company may have many projects characterized by rapidly assembled project teams, geographically dispersed, but with highly specialized professionals who perform specific projects. Thus, distributed teams and distributed projects will be very common in the future. SCRUM • Scrum was first described as The Rugby Approach in Harvard Business Review , emphasizing that small cross-functional teams produce better results. Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber used the Scrum approach in their companies in the mid-1990s, and they worked together to formalize the Scrum approach . Jeff Sutherland continued to study distributed projects using Scrum [cf. 11, 12]. The challenges of distributed projects • We define a distributed project as one where the project team is separated by geography, time zones and/or culture, but nevertheless has to work together as a team. • Distributed projects will typically - as traditional projects – have a project manager. The majority of project management work will be the same in a traditional or a distributed project. But some things will be different or more challenging when managing distributed projects. The question is of course: What will be different? RESEARCH METHOD • The second round of interviews and a visit to India • Coding and categorizing CASE ANALYSIS AND SOCIAL TEAM CAPITAL • The structural dimension • Relational dimension and trust • The Cognitive dimension ARTICULATION THEORY FOR COORDINATION • Coordination was analyzed in the first team process. In order for multiple actors within a project to pursue a common goal, they have to perform activities, which single actors pursuing the same goals would not have to do; these extra ordinary activities we call coordination. BOUNDARY OBJECTS FOR COMMUNICATION • Communication is the second of the “C”-categories we analyzed. The analysis has two parts: 1) general factors influencing the communication in the DELHI project, and 2) the theory of boundary objects to provide a deeper and better understanding of what is happening in relation to communication. CONTROL • The last “C” – Control - was also a category in our findings. Best practice in distributed teams takes in common milestones, frequent delivery, quick feedback, frequent meetings, and frequent progress reports . SOCIAL INTEGRATION, QUALITY AND MOTIVATION • Social integration concerns the sense of belonging to a team, identifying with the team. In the interviews with the DELHI project manager, he expressed satisfaction with the team members not only for their motivation, their dedication to the project, and their willingness to help each other, but also for helping the project to succeed and achieving their goal. The team members interviewed expressed great satisfaction working on this project, reporting that they were proud to be working on this project. We could not identify specific elements where Scrum supported social integration, but together they had a shared vision with clear and achievable goals. With much social capital, this provided a basis for social integration.