Should we have to bring the Scrum out of IT ?

When many talk about the future of agile approaches and Scrum in particular, they consider the spread of Scrum outside of IT.

To properly accompany the agile transition to another world, I think that asking how to get the agile out of IT is not the right question.

Why ? Because it is already out of IT !

Historic sprints

If we consider the history of Scrum in terms of cycles, we could imagine something like that :

• the historic sprint n°1 date roughly from 1950 to 2001, when people like Jeff Sutherland, Jeff McKenna, Mike Cohn, or other, innovated with new practices (not yet called agile) to address issues that the newborn "waterfall" did not solve.

• the historic sprint n°2 could begin in 2001 when the previous innovators made a huge retrospective and decided to share their experiences of project management (in addition to offering mulled wine down the tracks). And thus was born the Agile Manifesto.

It goes without saying that real historians of the agile approach will yell at me because of this short cut and shamed me because of the freedom I have taken here. They will certainly be right, but the goal is not to write History, it's to understood where we are in the life of the agile approaches in order to better know where we are going !

So we should be in the middle of the second historical sprint. In the middle or close to the end if we believe the growing number of people wondering "what next ?".

What could be the beginning of the next historic sprint ? I am convinced that the spread of agile practices outside the world of IT can be an excellent marker for the beginning of historic sprint number 3. This spread  has already begun with Joe Justice and Wikispeed project, among others.

If we want Agile and Scrum to be revealed outside of IT we should take care of next actions. I chose the word "revealed" because I believe strongly that it is more an awakening of existing practices more than a shifting of IT practices to other areas.

What the F ...lowers?

In fact, I do not think that the question  "how to bring out the agile approach out the world of IT" is the right question even if it is the right path. Why ? Because agile is already outside of IT. Do not forget that one of the big brother of these approaches is the Lean (or Toyota method ) from the automotive industry.
Having observed several non-IT organisations and more particularly a non-profit organization in the area of culture in France, composed entirely of volunteers, I am convinced that agile precepts are already used by many without knowing they are doing it.

Art Seine

Since more than 20 years, the association of Art Seine, manages an open stage in Paris call the Fieald (a french wordplay...) without state subsidy and in one of the finest Parisian theatre : the Trevise theatre. This is only after leaving its chairman position (and far before knowing the agile approach too) that I made the parallel between our practices in this organization and Scrum ceremonial. It was stunning to see that many of these practices were used more or less as clearly as Scrum describes them. I played the game to try to stick the Scrum approach to the working methods of the association and I found many similarities even about roles.

This is normal if you remembers that agile approaches are based on the principle of empiricism which is itself a universal principle. Would it be useful to apply in the strict sense Scrum to this association, or even a modified version of Scrum? I do not know, but perhaps it deserves to be studied.

Conclusion

This observation helps to find out the right question, which is no longer "Is it possible to get out of the agile approach to IT? "But "How to awaken dormant agile practices in other areas ?"

This new question will allow us to address this historic third sprint with a clearer vision and it will be less tied to the world of IT. Discover these practices would certainly be difficult, but agile approach would become a kind of meta model, disconnected from all areas, learning from them and thus benefit by each other's experiences. It may be utopian, but it seems to be a particularly sophisticated and inspiring approach of Scrum and agile.