• Visibility into the entirety of the project management process
• Motivates and inspires team members

From the Organization Perspective:

• It keeps the organization honest and helps them to meet their commitments
• Scrum promotes transparency; you no longer need to hide the truth, you can be open and honest with everyone.
• Decision making is shifted to the lowest level (line employees, to the people best able to understand all of the facts

From the Team Perspective:

• Unlock the true potential of the team
• The team gets to achieve a sustainable pace, so that they can continue to be productive over the long haul.

Other benefits of Scrum can be seen at the braintrust consulting group and CPRIME website.

Scrum limitations and concern

The use of scrum for system development does not satisfy top management’s need for budget, scope, and schedule control. The buyer gets exactly what they wanted but does know much it would cost, neither does the buyer knows how long the project or finished product would take or what the product would look like when it is done.
Agile method, like scrum, does not provide detail estimates of time and cost that management likes. Instead it focuses on ballpark estimate of time and cost. In response to these rough estimates, many organizations establish time and cost ceilings. These ceilings are the maximum budget that should not be exceeded in the development of a given product or service. This maximum budget reduces the level of uncertainty that scrum provides.

Another concern and limitation of scrum is that some organizations do not buy the idea of self-organizing teams and intense collaborations. The traditional organization is built on hierarchical structures for command and control. Agile method contradicts such structure. In essence, self-organizing and intense collaboration, are incompatible with corporate cultures. The Agile principles must be installed over time. It should be incorporated into the organization gradually.

It can be sometimes be difficult for the Scrum Master to plan, structure and organize a project that lack a clear definition. Moreover, frequent changes, frequent delivery and uncertainty regarding the precise nature of the finished product make for a rather intense project life cycle for everyone involved. In addition, the daily Scrum meetings and frequent reviews require substantial resources (Kelly 2008).

There are other believes that Scum is one of the leading causes of scope creep because unless there is a definite end date, the project management stakeholders will be tempted to keep demanding new functionality. Susan also added that if task is not well defined, estimating project costs and time will not be accurate, in such a case, the task can be spread over several sprints (Susan 2009).

Scrum method works best on small projects that requires only five to nine dedicated team members to complete the work. For this purpose, face-to-face communication is eminent. The communication replaces the time consuming documentation and informal coordination supplants top-down control. As such response to change is fast and result oriented. The barriers to decision making are very limited in scrum method because interactions are among three entities, the product owner, the development team, and the scrum master.

Even though scrum is limited to small projects, some organizations have succeeded in using the method on large projects by using a condition known as “scaling.” In scaling, large projects are broken down to parts. In other words, several teams work on different features at the same time. See figure 6 for diagram on scaling a large project. The challenge with scaling is integration, making sure that the different features being created work in harmony with each other.


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