The Japanese Roots of “Scrum”, Part I

I’m sure many of us in the software development world are aware of “Scrum.”

Scrum was derived from a Seminal Paper by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka

It is certainly worth a read (linked above).

From now on in this blog I will use the term “Japanese Rugby” or “Scrum-J” to describe the activities described in Nonaka et al.

First, in the Nonaka paper, we see that the corporations involved were trying to create RADICALLY NEW products, mostly in the consumer electronics space.

This is much different, from, say, some company wanting to do something straightforward such as develop an online presence with a shopping cart.

Additionally, many or most of the roles and ceremonies mentioned in Scrum are not mentioned in Nonaka.

They focus at a much higher level, talking about reorganizing business units along the lines of a startup.

The myopic focus on the team and it’s members such as Scrum Master, Product Owner, Daily Scrum, Burndown etc are no where to be found in this paper.

Jettisoning management is not mentioned; however working 60-100 hours/month of overtime is.

I encourage everyone to read this paper and compare and contrast it to what we in the USA call “Scrum”.

I will be referring to this paper in my future posts.

PostAgilist