Philip Fanthom and the Jenrick IT Consultant Team have been advising various companies regarding their recruitment needs within the scrum arena as a direct result of witnessing a clear increase in the number of companies that are now implementing the scrum development methodologies.

Furthermore, we also offer a range of Scrum Project Manager Jobs and other job roles within the Scrum Development Arena. Please read the article below to gain a useful insight into this methodology and its application:

Firstly, what is Scrum?
Basically Scrum is an agile development methodology which uses fast development cycles.

The word scrum usually is associated with a playing action in Rugby where team members link together and focus on trying to win the ball thereby executing a Rugby move. This also applies in the same way in organisations where their main goal is to successfully and efficiently complete projects by eliminating complexities from product development – and by working as a team to achieve these goals.

Scrum is a highly iterative process, which takes an incremental approach to software production. The development work is usually split into ‘sprints’ of thirty days and teams have daily ‘scrum’ meetings also known as ‘daily stand up meeting’.

The structure of the meeting is quite rigid and fixed. Everybody has to stand up, meeting should take no longer, then 10 - 15 minutes and everybody should answer three questions:

• What had been done yesterday?
• What will be done today?
• What obstacles will get in your way?
• Why are many organisations turning to Scrum?

Scrum has taken the IT industry by storm. SMEs to Global organisations such as Standard and Poor’s, BBC, AOL, BSKYB + many more believe that the Scrum methodology is by far the best way forward for the current and future IT market needs.

Companies see the Scrum methodology as a way of working better which means Project Managers, Business Analysts, Developers Testers are able to cope better with changes, as they will expect a requirement of change at some point. Other benefits also include:

• Organisations have a very high rate of successful projects.
• Increases the quality of the deliverables.
• Provide better estimates that help to be more cost efficient.
• Allows for greater control over the project schedule and state.

The positive effects that scrum methodology has on the organisation are achieving higher customer satisfaction for the end client products, which is delivered on time, and often exceed the expectations of both users and management.

Most importantly the Scrum process ensures that the team works on the most important requirements at that particular time and that the team is appropriately empowered to make all essential decisions.

This means the team commits to the work and is responsible for seeing the work is completed on time, resulting in an impressive transformation of development style, bringing huge gains in competitiveness.

Eric Koetsch, a software test engineer at Bose Corp., Framingham, Mass., said Bose is using Scrum in a development project he is involved in:
“I can definitely see how Scrum could be useful in a test environment. Scrum helps add to the level of quality in the software you’re developing. You have to really buy into the process, but once you see success in some of the early sprints everybody seems to follow on and take advantage of the opportunity to build better code.”

Questions for your consideration:

1) Where do you see Scrum in 5 years time in organisations?

2) Every day I come across many candidates with no Scrum background that very keen to work for organisations that use scrum. The issues that I’m facing is many organisations always seem to want candidates from a Scrum background what would you recommend to candidates with no previous Scrum experience?

3) What changes have you seen working in organisations that use Scrum compared to organisations that don’t ?

Applying this within my own environment:

Everyday more and more companies I deal with are introducing scrum within their organisations. The demand for Scrum Project managers, Business analysts, Developers, Testers has grown immensely. These organisations are constantly recruiting for consultants that have experience working within the scrum arena.

If you have worked within a scrum environment and seeking a new challenge in your career please send your CV to Jenrick IT or call our IT Recruitment Agency directly on (01932) 245 500.

Tags: scrum agile project manager jobs, scrum project manager jobs, scrum project manager jobs london

This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 9:50 am and is filed under Jenrick IT, Job Hunting Tips, Job Market News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.