Agile Writing: A Project Management Approach to Learning

Scrum methodologies that support cross-functional writing teams to develop polished increments of writing instead of lengthy drafts of documents stand to improve productivity and learning within organizations. Scrum methodologies may be deployed in higher education as well as in nonacademic settings to achieve purposeful knowledge transfer across disciplines and across academic/industry borders. Key to scrum is an emphasis on productivity within fixed time frames, with productivity facilitated by learning that emerges in cross-functional teams. Higher education is similarly a domain in which productivity in fixed time frames takes the measure of student learning. Across the disciplines, scrum methodologies show promise for improving the quality of collaborative problem-solving in writing projects in college and at work.