Research pick: Scrum to tackle musical concerts - "Adopting scrum methodology in the project of organising a concert"

There are two approaches to the management of a project. The traditional waterfall, or cascade, model involves creating a detailed plan for the sequences of steps that must be carried out to take the project from inception to manifestation. Such a linear approach can be compromised when problems arise that require changes that can have a knock-on effect further down the line.

An alternative approach to managing a project is the agile approach. A project is considered to be a collection of relatively small stages, known as cycles or iterations, that are interconnected rather than a complete process that runs from beginning to end in a linear manner. This more modular approach to project management allows changes to be made and problems to be addressed by adjusting the components of a small stage without necessarily disturbing the flow of the other stages and so, as is the name suggests is more adaptable. While agile project management initially emerged from the world of information technology it finds application in many disparate areas and itself now takes many different forms each suited to those areas where agile project management is needed.

Writing in the International Journal of Project Organisation and Management, a team from Poland has looked at a particularly popular form of agile project management – Scrum – originally devised by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber as a tool for managing complex software development. The team, Ewa Marchwicka, Paulina Tusz, and Jan Betta of the Wroclaw University of Science and Technology in Poland suggest that the Scrum approach is well suited to organizing a musical concert.

The Scrum website itself describes the approach as “a lightweight yet incredibly powerful set of values, principles, and practices.” It relies on cross-functional teams that can deliver products and services in short cycles, which means it offers fast feedback, quicker innovation, continuous improvement, and rapid adaptation to change. The team hopes these benefits will be applicable to organising concerts under the auspices of The National Forum of Music in Poland. Indeed, their initial investigations and interviews, although not definitive at this point, do suggest that music institutions would benefit enormously from adopting the Scrum approach to managing their projects.

Marchwicka, E., Tusz, P. and Betta, J. (2022) ‘Adopting scrum methodology in the project of organising a concert’, Int. J. Project Organisation and Management, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp.1–19.