Scrum as Project Management Framework

Project management is the art and science of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing set of inter-related tasks to meet specific objectives and achieve specific success criteria within specified time by a specially assembled team. The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals within the given constraints (primarily time, cost, quality and scope).

Scrum is the world’s most popular framework for developing, delivering and sustaining complex products through effective team collaboration. Scrum is not a process, technique or definitive method. Rather, it is a framework within which various processes and techniques can be employed.

While many in the agile quarters believe Scrum to be a project management framework, the fact remains that Scrum is a product development framework not a project management framework. 

Product development primarily focuses on the what and the how of the way the product evolves to achieve its purpose, on the other hand project management focuses on the coordination and governance associated with the environment in which product development happens.

Project Management deals with matters such as:

• What – addressing the scope of project
• Who is involved in all aspects of the project.
• Why the work should be undertaken. The focus on a business case and realizing value.
• When the work should be done.
• Where – including all matters related to the working environment.

While Scrum addresses the what (product backlog), who (Scrum team), why (product goal/ sprint goal), when (sprint) but it does not address where. It is also noteworthy that Scrum is not constrained by the time, cost, quality and scope in the way a project is constrained, particularly the cost constraint is not in the same form. Scrum also deals with stakeholder and attempts to keep them satisfied but it does not create stakeholder engagement strategies like many project management frameworks do. Neither does it bother about stakeholder identification and categorization like a project would do. 

Most recently there has been an un-official concept being practiced called Scrum of Scrums. This concept supports the multi-scrum team environment and has its advantages. However, it still does not facilitate multi-team collaboration that is usually needed in a project environment. 

Many attempts to enhance Scrum into a project management framework have failed in the professional world as it was never the intended purpose of Scrum framework. Most recently Agile Business Consortium and APMG International have collaborated to introduce AgilePM for Scrum framework which presents a strong customization of AgilePM (for agile project management) designed to integrate seamlessly with Scrum (for agile product development) in a single framework. 

Agile Project Management (AgilePM) is the world’s leading guidance and certification for agile project management which achieves an ideal balance between the standards, rigour and visibility required for good project management, and the fast-pace, change and empowerment provided by agile.

AgilePM for Scrum is intended to bring together the powerful simplicity and potent agility of Scrum for product development, exactly as described in the Scrum Guide 2020, with key elements of AgilePM that bring agility to the much broader project context. AgilePM for Scrum Provides a flexible, full lifecycle framework for organisations to deliver value from any discipline, industry, or function challenged by volatility, uncertainty complexity and ambiguity in their working environment.

AgilePM for Scrum is a guidance, training and certification program that offers participants a framework that combines the world’s leading agile product delivery approach (Scrum) with the world’s leading agile project management approach (AgilePM) to offer a single framework for the delivery of complete business solutions.

It is wise not to make Scrum something it was never intended to be and extract the most value from it by using it within project management by using a framework that has been specially designed to address the integration of scrum within project management.