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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.
Keywords: Agile project management, SCRUM, IT service desk, Operations management, Performance measures
1.INTRODUCTION
Traditional project management, considered as a combination of methods, techniques, procedures, rules, templates and best practices used to project activities meet the project requirements, suffers from several disadvantages (Cervone, 2011, pp. 18-22). The main one concerns the fact that requirements definitions are often so labor intensive, protracted and takes up significant project's resource. These processes are so long that by the time, because of modified requirements, they have to be changed before any development even begin. Especially, software development community found that traditional development approaches were not suitable for empirical, unpredictable and non-repeatable processes like software development (OOPSLA conference, 1995). As a response to these problems, agile project management approach was developed primarily as a tool for software companies to drive productivity. After that time, there is a large number of evidence...