"Filling to Capacity": An Exploratory Study of Project Management Language in Agile Scrum Teams

Purpose: This exploratory study investigates the project management (PM) language used by Agile Scrum team members at a software development firm within their Scrum meetings. Method: The meetings from three sprints were audio-recorded and all spoken exchanges were transcribed. A codebook was developed to assess for meeting function PM language. A correspondence analysis assessed the association of Scrum meeting type and PM language. Results: The results of this exploratory study suggest that the Scrum team members use PM language in somewhat ritualized ways, particularly when some of the PM language is deployed. The correspondence analysis also suggests five associations between certain meeting types and certain PM language. Conclusion: This exploratory study provides a baseline of in situ Scrum-based project management upon which other studies may build, which may become useful as future studies may expand to include Kanban and Scrumban. It also suggests that while this Scrum-based group uses some PM language in expected ways (i.e., team maintenance is associated with kickoff meetings), other uses are unexpected (i.e., planning language is not associated with planning meetings). These differentiations from the ideal Scrum PM process suggest that future research is warranted.