If you were to have a conversation with Joanna Durand about her career and her wealth of accomplishments, you would think that everything was perfectly planned and executed—just like an ideal project. However, Joanna more accurately ‘fell into’ project management as part of a career change from stockbroker to supporting a merger between two financial institutions. As part of that learning experience, she had the opportunity to gain knowledge from one of the Big 5 Consulting Firms, Accenture. Under their tutelage, Joanna began to learn the job of project manager, without knowing that it was an important profession—one that would soon define her fast-paced career.

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In addition to its rugby roots, Scrum also can attribute its beginnings to two Japanese thought leaders. Scrum was modeled after “The New New Product Development Game” by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, published in the Harvard Business Review in 1986. Nonaka was hired by the Japanese government after World War II to help analyze why they lost the war. Takeuchi is considered to be one of the top ten business school professors in the world.

According to Dr. Jeff Sutherland, “Together their formal model has led us down the path to an extraordinary implementation of their vision of Scrum project management. Both of these teachers are surprised and impressed with the wide-spread adoption of Scrum in software.”

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