Over the many years I have worked in project management I have become less and less a fan of the highly formalised methodologies and much more impressed by Agile approaches. I have seen more death marches driven by gantts than I care to remember. In fact, I saw one in Lucent many years ago that took MS Project over five minutes to load due to the number of dependencies they were trying to track. In the past year, I sat down with the two Scrum books and read them cover to cover. Whilst I did have some criticisms, I bought into the ideas being presented almost entirely.

I decided to try some of them out mid-project to dip the toe in the water and if successful I would take a full Scrum approach at the start of the next project. The few things I did try worked very well and were embraced by all. The daily stand-up scrum was particularly liked. Whilst I could not implement actual 30-day sprints, I did do some “sprint overlays” for my own purposes.

Now that I am kicking off this new phase of Argolon and building something from scratch, I am convinced that Scrum will be of major benefit and for all of the work I’ll be doing in Cork, I’ll be using it. Of course there are issues with me being the customer, the scrum master and part of the team all at the same time but there are ways of mitigating that. However, my biggest concern is that I will be outsourcing large amounts of the work both in Ireland and offshore and I don’t know whether [a] the approach can work across continents or [b] any outsourcer will be willing or knowledgeable enough to work within the framework.

If memory serves, Ken Schwaber himself is not a fan of outsourcing and believes that Scrum works best with totally co-located teams. But on my last project I was dealing with people in Sunnyvale, Boston, Cork, Meath, UK, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Bangalore, Beijing and Tokyo. That was the main reason for only using bits of Scrum locally.

I’m very interested to hear of any Irish based companies who are using Scrum and what their insights are. If anyone globally has experience of using Scrum with outsourcers, I would really appreciate as much detail as you are willing to share. If you have recommendations for outsourcers who know and like Scrum, even better. And finally, if you do provide outsourcing services with a particular focus on web application development and have experience in Scrum or other Agile methodologies, feel free to post a comment or contact me using the details on the contact page.

[tags]Scrum, Ken Schwaber, Outsourcing, Offshoring, Agile, Gantt[/tags]