Putting the focus on products
As noted in the earlier section Requiring executive sponsorship, Scrum's implementation eliminates the plan-driven approach of traditional project management practices because there are too many unknowns in terms of customer needs, priorities, risks, and potential impediments. In the next subsection, you will learn how empiricism is a better approach to managing work in a project-oriented environment that experiences random and uncontrolled events. However, before we get there, we need to understand that the focus of work must be product-specific. We also need to understand why this is the case.
A traditional organization creates hierarchical organizational structures to support business functions, such as sales, marketing, development, and so on. This decomposition continues below the functional departmental level, with teams established by their type of work or skills.
Under the traditional model, project managers follow pre-defined plans...