After the recent Talk About IT event in Amsterdam, Hugo Messer interviewed me and asked, ‘What are the three biggest benefits for software companies and IT departments who implement Scrum?’ (video - YouTube)

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I told Hugo that the three biggest benefits of Scrum are that it gives your software development:

1. transparency that exposes status, progress and issues that prevent progress
2. the opportunity to address the issues that Scrum helps you identify
3. the chance that you will actually improve your software development process, and therefore project success.

This was not an especially prepared answer, and is one that reflects my usual operational perspective. If I had been thinking from a business-focused perspective, I could have just as easily named the three biggest benefits of:

1. customer involvement in key project decisions
2. customer control and influence over project direction
3. customer responsibility for setting business priorities.

Peter Hilton is a senior software developer and Operations Director at Lunatech Research.

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