For our second specialist interview in our series speaking to technology and IT leaders around the world, we’ve welcomed Scrum Master David Rutter to share his thoughts on the topic of agile and Scrum as well as where he sees the future of work evolving in this area. David has over thirty years of experience working in IT and works as a Scrum Master across two teams, development and operations. He also blogs about teamwork and agile at the Art Of Team Work website.

Project managers are the link between programmers and designers and between sales and customers. As such, project managers have to understand the importance of efficient, automated business processes and be comfortable dealing with people. At Germany-based global IT services and consulting company T-Systems, we take project management seriously. That's why we have a dedicated project management committee and 1,700 full-time project managers.

It is no secret that the failure rate of IT projects is the biggest worry for project managers. Add to this the impact of the current pandemic. A cursory Google search will present you with reports from Gartner, Statista and many others detailing how the spending in Global IT is projected to go down in 2020 (We still don’t have complete figures for all the financial quarters in 2020) compared to 2019. This is despite the availability of vaccines and the growing number of vaccinated population.

IT teams across the digital world are currently facing their biggest test yet. Ensuring that things are running smoothly when employees are working from home. And they’re doing a very good job at it. But, there’s always room for improvement right? If you’ve ever been a part of an IT team, you know the pain of jumping between multiple software tools, the effects of a broken down collaboration system and the struggle for visibility amongst team members.

Seeing someone manage big projects makes it seem like an easy job. How long would it take to send emails to employees? It probably takes a minute to check your inbox or call a member of your team to give them an assignment. Actual project managers will tell you that this cannot be further from the truth. Sure, all those small tasks take a small amount of time but group them all and you get a shocking amount of time.