Agile & distributed project management: a case study revealing why scrum is useful

Scrum has gained surprising momentum as an agile IS project management approach. An obvious question is why Scrum is so useful? To answer that question we carried out a longitudinal study of a distributed project using Scrum. We analyzed the data using coding and categorisation and three carefully selected theoretical frameworks. Our conclusion in this paper is that Scrum is so useful because it provides effective communication in the form of boundary objects and boundary spanners, it provides effective social integration by building up social team capital, and it provides much needed control and coordination mechanisms by allowing both local and global articulation of work in the project. That is why Scrum is especially useful for distributed IS project management and teamwork