The pressures of a truly global economy cause today's business to increasingly rely on their ability to produce software as a key competitive advantage. Whether it be software for managing manufacturing and customer delivery processes or software improving the efficiency of day-to-day activities, software touches virtually every facet of today's businesses.

And yet for many organizations, software development practices remain as they were in the 1980s. Reliance on prescriptive, plan-based, waterfall methods is common despite mountains of evidence that these practices often fail to achieve real value delivery in a timely fashion, and so hamper our company's responsiveness to fast-changing customer requirements and market conditions. And it's not getting easier. Today's IT organizations must also effectively coordinate globally distributed software development teams while re-factoring legacy applications into more flexible, service oriented architectures.

Clearly, we need a new approach for managing and developing software to remain competitive. To address these challenges, a number of more agile software development techniques are being adopted that allow organizations to deliver higher quality software more quickly. Scrum is one such proven method that has seen widespread adoption in many software organizations to support Agile project management and iterative methods.

This whitepaper describes how a CIO or other executive manager can implement Scrum on an organization-wide basis where software, and lots of it, is the key to competitive success in the marketplace. The whitepaper outlines how to scale Scrum across larger applications and teams of teams and the challenges and rewards CIOs and executive managers will face.

This is a "playbook" of ideas about implementing Scrum within an enterprise. It is called a playbook rather than a manual because each organization is unique. Scrum's implementation within one enterprise will be significantly different from its implementation in another. The types of impediments, things that need to be changed, the difficulty of change, and the people who will implement the change are different, so the timetables, the priorities, and the effort will be different as well.

The CIO or executive manager who commits to improving software outcomes with Scrum will take the first step in ensuring that the enterprise is well on its way to achieving the business benefits of faster and better quality software delivery.