Recently, a new ScrumMaster from Atlanta pointed out the project in the photos above is a medical research project at the U.S. Center for Disease Control. The EPM Solutions blog item by Lisa Grant has a nice description of how you can cut research time in half and increase innovation and collaboration with Scrum.
I spent a lot of time this year at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory where they invented GPS and many other innovations for military projects. The Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratory uses Scrum (scary thought). The secret is to timebox a research activity with clear entry and exit conditions. Often the exit condition is an answer to a question that will determine the next step in the research.
If I had to do another Ph.D. thesis, I would definitely use Scrum. I could cut the time in half and significantly improve the quality.
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