Last year, our fearless team of interaction designers, creative designers and interface engineers (about 20 of us at the time) took the decision to embrace Scrum, the “agile” methodology for project management.
We were all given training courses to attend, and I myself volunteered (along with several others) to become a certified Scrum Master. As we began on sprints, attended sprint planning and reviews, and got together for sprint retrospectives afterwards, we debated the details of what we were trying to do. Our goal was to produce better things, possibly faster, but certainly more efficiently by controlled iterations and close contract between team members.
I believe we tried as hard as we could to make it work. However, after 6 months we could see it was not going the way we had hoped. Reluctantly, we began to prepare to transition the UX capability out of Scrum and back into something more like our old “waterfall” method. We enforced closure on this with a “failure party” a few weeks ago, to mark an episode from which we learnt a great deal.