Scrum is an agile process that has proven itself to work in project/product development environments that experience rapid change and/or emergent requirements. The complexity in these efforts can result from the domain,
number of people involved, compression in time, emergent feedback and more. Scrum is suited for projects that require the combined intellect of more than an individual to solve a difficult problem.
Agile processess have been thrust into the limelight by the work done in the area of software development. Software development has been a unique application because rapid feedback cycles are possible. Unlike other human efforts, software has been one the fastest models for understanding intense human collaborative efforts. Despite software development being new relative to man's history on the planet, it has offered us a chance to rapidly learn what works well for intense collaborative efforts that face extreme amounts of comlexity. Software development has enabled a rapid viral model of understanding how people work together to build something very complex. Project or product development is what we commonly call this area. The rapid evolution of understanding has quickly propelled agile software from an area of almost pure art, to creative craft, with well understood engineering practices that support the craft. So although the lessons have come from software, the lessons are broadly applicable across many other industries. As a result, we see Scrum and other agile methods being broadly applied to other organizations where compexity reigns.
A quick way to overview Scrum is by looking at it's three roles.
Scrum development is for more than just software development. It was born from the need to create software, but is much more about enabling rapid intense human collaboration. Because Scrum enables such rapid feedback, it has proven itself in many domains other than software and has become generally applicable to knowledge work. With Scrum, you can bring a burning focus to the most demanding of problems. When Scrum is applied with care, a well formed team becomes focused on delivering business value.
Scrum is for managing and performing complex work. Scrum is a social agreement to be empirical as a team. Scrum follows agile's big rule.
Scrum challenges us to rethink some of our most vexing problems. One of those problems is performance review or compensation models for completed work. Classic performance appraisal systems, are often not team oriented, but evaluated on an individuals performance. This is not surprising when you look at the difficulty of accounting for team behavior. The downfall of too much focus on the individual is that we discourage team behavior and it becomes a game of maximizing one's individual perceived benefit. Designing balanced systems for that hit the sweet spot between recognizing individuals vs. teams continues to be a difficult topic. There is no silver bullet formula, 360 or other. Ask for more information on this topic if you are interested.
Scrum is about humanizing the process so that a team can optimize it's pursuit of a goal.