Three Keys to Getting Your Projects Under Control, Part 1 : In the first of a three-part series, CIOs frustrated by project management pitfalls in Agile methodologies and techniques like Scrum will learn to plug leaks of time and costs that threaten deliverables. (Les parties 2 et 3 à suivre durant la semaine)

New techniques were created to manage the micro-projects along the way. Scrum, the limited-horizon, single-focus, daily-meeting-based, Agile methodology (see "Agile Software Development with Scrum") is such an invention. The key advantage a Scrum approach brings is the unchallengeable focus on a specific deliverable.

Just like any methodology, it is easy to find examples of both glowing successes and glaring failures in the Scrum community. And this is not a place to debate the merits either way. But there are two significant drawbacks to the Scrum approach.

First, there is a real risk of investing too much time in Scrum sessions. A good target for communication is 5 percent to 10 percent of the time. A project suffers when communication drops below 5 percent of the time, and the benefits drop off significantly around 9 percent to 10 percent.

Scrum sessions should take 30 minutes, about 6.25 percent of a day, which fits nicely into the optimum model-so far, so good. Theoretically, that should leave just enough time for other reviews and the management reporting that is necessary in an ideal world.

However, it is rare to find team meetings that last only 30 minutes. It is far more common to find the entire daily allotment of 48 minutes (10 percent), if not more, consistently consumed. By the time the coordination, the other the necessary reviews and reports are complete, team efficiency and effectiveness will have dropped significantly into the unproductive zone, squandering the assigned resources.

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