Scrum is an agile framework that, if applied properly, can boost the efficiency of teamwork. It is known to be versatile enough, so it could be applied in basically any sort of productive teamwork, even beyond IT (e.g. bakeries, government organizations, etc.)
However, I’ve never ever seen it being used anywhere else other than in software development, therefore I’ve always been curious if Scrum is actually being used outside of IT somewhere.
I’ve seen agile in design of electrical and mechanical hardware. We have one person in our company who knows wtf she is doing with it and can lead an ok agile project. Personally, I think a spiral design process works better for physical hardware than agile does generally.
The others I’ve witnessed struggle to maintain discrete sprints. Everything becomes top priority with some reason to deviate from the structured schedule.
The Operations floor has Tier meetings everyday, which is the closest thing I can think of to scrums and still useful for an Ops environment. A work cell (tier 4) meets first thing in the morning to go over the production schedule for the day and any problems. The leader of the cell takes the schedule and problems in need of escalation to the product line (tier 3) meeting. And out of those, to Operations leaders and the GM at tier 2. All tier meetings are standup, on the floor in front of the area’s metrics/schedule board. Where I currently work, the tier 4 and 3 are pretty short most days, maybe 10 min. Tier 2 does drag on. I don’t think there’s a tier 1 and don’t know why the numbers were picked as they were.