Project Management: England’s Favorite Sport Becki Dilworth

Every Tuesday and Thursday at 9:30 am several of us Indigians gather to scrum. Now, for some of you who have read a few fancy schmancy books on agile development, you may think that in this meeting we discuss things like pigs and chickens and adaptive project management. Though we definitely see the value in this type of development and subscribe to a fair bit of its core philosophy, our morning scrums stem from an entirely different meaning of the word:

Rugby.

Now. I know that the development scrum has some roots in the rugby scrum. But, coming from a 4-year college rugby player, there were never chickens or pigs or stakeholders or project owners anywhere on the rugby pitch. Ok. One time there was a pig.

Based on my experiences in college, any given rugby scrum involves a few key elements:

• A Scrum Half - Throwing the ball in and providing signals to the Hooker to help out the team
• A Hooker – Doing their best to keep the ball on their side of the scrum
• Props -Doing all the heavy lifting to keep the scrum solid and support their Hooker
• Biting, kicking and pulling hair

Every morning I see the same sort of teams forming here at Indigio. We join our clients in a scrum against our opposition — which in any project, can range from a limited budget to a constraining timeline.

Our clients, the Scrum Half who throw in the initial ball, do their absolute best to make sure our team succeeds against the potential opposition. The Hooker – our client services managers – direct the scrum and are often in the front lines getting kicked shins and sore ears. And lastly, the Props – our engineers, designers, QA, IT and search team – hold the entire scrum together, continuing to hold up the Hooker throughout the scrum.

With all of the analogizing above, I will say that our projects generally run much smoother than your typical rugby scrum. Rarely are people bitten or is hair pulled. Even rarer still is a high level of contention between our clients’ goals and their budget and/or timeline.

Nonetheless, every Tuesday and Thursday I get to return to my rugby days. I may even recommend a few rousing rugby songs to liven things up even more.

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