SharePoint and Scrum - Calling SharePoint Scrum Masters

A couple of years ago, the company I was working for made a major commitment to migrating from the traditional "waterfall" approach to software development to Scrum.  Almost everyone in the company was put through Scrum training, and teams were pushed to immediately convert their product roadmaps to sprints.

I was serving as a product manager, working with multiple project managers on a portfolio of consumer facing software products.  Although we primarily relied on our PjMs to take on the role of Scrum Master, I also sought out Scrum Master training and partnered with project leads to evangelize the transition.

I went into Scrum training with a lot of skepticism.  In general, Scrum and agile development just seemed like the fashionable fad of the day, buzzwords our executives had latched on to after reading the latest Business Week cover story.

The training program completely turned me around.  The instructor kicked off the course with a series of questions, like... "Is your development cycle so long that product features are obsolete before they get to market?"  "Do you spend more time documenting requirements than you do thinking about the needs of end users?"  "Have you ever accepted a sub-optimal implementation, just to avoid going through an onerous change management process?"  It was as if someone had looked into my heart and heard my most personal inner frustrations.  These were exactly the problems that I wrestled with every day.

I truly believed that these issues were unique to my company, not inherent to the development methodology we were using.  To hear someone propose that the inefficiencies and hassles that had become part of my life as a product manager were systemic, and fixable, was very nearly a religious experience.  I became a rabid Scrum aficionado, and focused a great deal of personal energy on leading the adoption and implementation of Scrum. 

The training I had was conducted by Rally Software.  I highly recommend the company, and became especially fond of Hubert Smits the trainer that we spent the most time with.  One of the things about Hubert that won me over quickly was the fact that he actually discouraged us from considering the purchase of Rally's project management software.  Rather, he strongly advocated that we jump into Scrum using either flip charts and index cards or an Excel spreadsheet.  His advice was to learn and practice the Scrum process and embrace the Scrum value system before buying a sophisticated toolkit.

We didn't strictly follow that advice.  One of my project managers was particularly clever and geeky.  He tracked down a simple open source tool called Xplanner that we adopted in favor of an Excel spreadhseet.  We did well with that tool.  Xplanner automatically creates burn down and burn up charts, tracks resource allocation and provides a simple way to store and manage "stories" (stories and sagas are the Scrum equivalent of feature descriptions or requirements.

Now that I'm working in a SharePoint environment, it occurs to me that all of the basic functionality for running Scrum is right here.  The feature backlog could be managed very nicely as a simple SharePoint list.  I'm not sure exactly how I would go about constructing a burn down chart, but I suspect it would be fairly easy with Bamboo's Chart Plus Web Part.  Stories from the feature backlog list could be easily assigned to particular sprints.  SharePoint would be far better than Xplanner as it would provide discussion boards, wikis and blogs that would provide a place to capture discoveries and foster real-time and asynchronous conversations.

Somebody out there must be doing this.  A quick Google search reveals a few random conversations and references, but no packaged solutions or templates.  Reiterating the call for project managers to contribute use cases, case studies and white papers on the subject of SharePoint for Project Management, this is a subject I'd really love to hear more about.  How's it going?  Are there any sticking points or functional gaps?  Do you have to compromise any core scrum philosophies to leverage SharePoint?  Please visit our Project Management forum and share your thoughts with Bamboo Nation.