ROLLING OUT OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT BY SCRUM: THE CASE OF CROATIAN IT COMPANY

Abstract

SCRUM is agile, a lightweight framework for managing and controlling teams working on complex product development in a rapidly changing environment. Software development community noticed a "long" history of successful supporting agile development projects. Although the SCRUM framework had a primary task to improve software engineering processes, it seems that it can be used to improve the work output of a change-driven team in any business sector. This paper is a case study of practice in one Croatian company, which already successfully uses agile principles for software development, applying SCRUM principles to daily operations in their Information Technology (IT) service desk. IT service desk was considered as a main IT support capability in the organization on the operational level of IT service management (ITSM), which refers to the entirety of activities that are performed by the organization to design, plan, deliver, operate and control IT services offered to customers. Describing specific adaptation of basic SCRUM elements to daily IT service management requirements, the paper explores the impact of a used operational framework for team performance. Specifically, whether it is applicable for that purpose use of Software Development Performance Index (SDPI index) across the key dimensions of Quality, Productivity, Predictability and Responsiveness. The case study tries to fill the lack of scientific support to growing numbers of agile methods application examples in modern organizations outside the software engineering arena.