To make Scrum work, it requires buy-in from the various project leaders a software development team might work with.

I recently gave a small lunch time talk here at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute to project leaders who work with the production software team to explain the benefits of the Scrum approach, and what it meant for them going forward. My slides are here.

The talk went well - with all the project leaders present agreeing to give it a try. One of Scrum’s major advantages when seeking support (over more general ‘agile’ approaches, even) is that every aspect can be time boxed. If Scrum fails for some reason, the relatively short development sprint means that the actual cost of the failure is low.

Tom Peters may disagree with me, but when developing mission critical software, reduced risk is a good thing.