To those who say, “Yeah, yeah, Scrum sucks, but show me something better,” here is one of the many promising alternatives.

The software development company Basecamp uses a system that is decidedly non-Scrum-like. Their process is well-documented in an online book. Here are some quotes to give you an idea of how it works:

Six Week Cycles

Our decisions are based on moving the product forward in the next six weeks, not micromanaging time. We don’t count hours or question how individual days are spent. We don’t have daily meetings. We don’t rethink our roadmap every two weeks. Our focus is at a higher level. We say to ourselves: “If this project ships after six weeks, we’ll be really happy. We’ll feel our time was well spent.” Then we commit the six weeks and leave the team alone to get it done.

Defining Projects

Projects are defined at the right level of abstraction: concrete enough that the teams know what to do, yet abstract enough that they have room to work out the interesting details themselves. When shaping, we focus less on estimates and more on our appetite. Instead of asking how much time it will take to do some work, we ask: How much time do we want to spend? How much is this idea worth? This is the task of shaping: narrowing down the problem and designing the outline of a solution that fits within the constraints of our appetite.

Delegation

Third, we give full responsibility to a small integrated team of designers and programmers. They define their own tasks, make adjustments to the scope, and work together to build vertical slices of the product one at a time. This is completely different from other methodologies, where managers chop up the work and programmers act like ticket-takers.

Check out basecamp.com/shapeup to get more details. Contrary to popular belief, Scrum is NOT the only game in town!