Scrum Applications Outside Information Technology Industry: A Systematic Literature Review and Future Agenda

Abstract

Purpose - Scrum is a framework born in the software development industry and has recently been used in other organizations and departments. This research assesses how the scrum framework has been applied for continuous improvement and innovation in fields other than the Information Technology (IT) industry or department. Study Design/Methodology/Approach - A Systematic Review of the Literature methodology was developed using two databases (ProQuest and Scopus). From an initial set of 2,900 publications, 395 articles passed the exclusion criteria and were included in this research. Information such as scrum area or field application, authors’ name, authors’ affiliation, publication year, and journal name were collected and used to conduct several bibliometric analyses. Findings - Results indicated that scrum can be used for continuous improvement and innovation in fields other than the IT industry or department. Scrum is mainly applied to change a process completely to address a problem or to update a process to improve indicators in different industrial sectors, such as medical, automotive, educational, and construction. Originality - Scrum is a recent framework that offers considerable potential for future research, and this paper highlights the fields in which it can be specialized. This investigation proves that scrum is highly flexible and guarantees success and improvement in most cases.