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The Advantages of blending SCRUM with PRINCE2

Scrum has enormous potential – something that has been proven in countless development projects even beyond the field of IT. Scrum can make the most out of a team’s strengths and can therefore achieve a level of performance that is not usual in classic projects. This particular concentration on the team, however, has its drawbacks. The relationship to the organisation, represented by the ‘unpopular’ management, is to a large extent unaccounted for, but in all honestly that doesn’t really concern Scrum. So Scrum needs to be embedded.

In practice individuals must deal with the resulting tensions and rarely does this turn out to be the Scrum Master. Instead it is more often the burden of the sorry Product Owner, who is lumbered with the responsibility of any task which remains unregulated. Real world case studies show that organisations often establish a classic project structure with a Project Manager and the usual planning and reporting parallel to the Scrum team. This results in complex parallel structures and the daily question of who is left holding the baby.

Recently the topic of combining Prince2 and Scrum has been widely discussed. It is a worthwhile endeavour, for both methods have their strengths. Moreover they lie in very different spheres and focus intentionally on different aspects. Prince2 devotes itself entirely to governance, the interplay of the management levels in projects. Scrum in contrast predominantly takes the approach of focussing on releasing the potential of teams. So why shouldn't we bring the two together?

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