I’ve curated these links on Scrum because the Web is now chock full of consultants and explanations — most of which are pretty good, but most of which are really directed toward software developers and aren’t going to be very helpful to readers of Growth through Governance.  The following are some good places to start.

I very seldom have time for videos, but I really liked the Scrum Alliance’s very brief, helpful video.  I appreciate the Scrum Alliance’s perspective — which I share — that “Scrum originally was formalized for software development projects, but it works well for any complex, innovative scope of work. The possibilities are endless.”  If they’re right, then you and I are on the right track.  I’d start here to get further information about Scrum.  The video does, however, unabashedly use scrum terminology without explaining it, so the video will make more sense after you’ve read my explanations of the terms on pages 241-247 of Chapter 9 of Growth through Governance.

Some of the information out there is very software-directed, so if you do your own search, don’t be intimidated away from trying Scrum because of that, but just know that it’s an emerging discipline that has not yet been systematically applied beyond its origins in engineering.  The Wikipedia article provides quite a lot of helpful detail, but it is pretty software-focused, so you might have to use your imagination when reading it.  Scrum.org offers nice graphics and friendly explanations — friendly, that is, if you’re a software person.  They’ve made it accessible at a level that makes sense for their intended audience (see Chapter 11 of Growth through Governance on that topic).  Again, if you venture over there, you might need to use your imagination a little bit more.  You’ll also need their principle of “courage,” appearing on their “Scrum Values” poster, which, by the way, I love.

As a new field, the scrum community’s rough edges haven’t been polished off yet, so the quality out there varies.  For example, ScrumMethodology.org starts right in with a nonsense polemic about the alleged “failure of the dominant software development project management paradigms.”  As a general rule, certainly with application here but also with application far beyond here, stay away from people who talk like that, especially if they don’t explain just what it was that failed.  No, honey, the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) — which is the subject of Chapter 8 of Growth through Governance — has not collapsed in failure.

Rather, as I explain throughout Chapter 9 of Growth through Governance, PMBOK-style project management and scrum-style practices are complementary, each offering advantages the other lacks.  What I call project management (Chapter 8) came first, by just a few years, and certainly presented certain deficiencies that were addressed by what I call productivity management (Chapter 9), including Scrum.  But it isn’t a contest which one is better.  I recommend nonprofit leaders learn both sets of practices enough to decide when their organizations need to borrow specific practices from either or both of these disciplines.