Scrum being a subset of agile is a lightweight process framework for agile development. Certain aspects of the Agile Manifesto have a rigid process structure and orthodox scrum practitioners claim that any deviation from the manifesto leads to certain failure. However, the failure is often in the organizational culture, which leaves little room for the orthodox scrum to thrive.

Creating a usable piece of code with each story is one of the prime principles of agile, where each creative piece is incomplete without the approval of executives and is then ready for publishing. The agile hack is to segment this process into a draft, editing, review, etc. Creative agile work can be done in a scrum in these ways.

One of the other key processes in the agile scrum is planning poker, in which the whole team sizes the stories in the backlog so that they can commit to a reasonable amount of work in the next sprint. When planning poker degrades into sizing apathy, it can lead to bad behavior, where some people pad their sizing to ward against writer’s block. The hack for this is “pull-in stories.” These are stories the team did not commit to in a sprint, but that they can work on if they have spare cycles because of dependencies. Pull-in stories encourage good behavior and team initiative.

One of the parts of the Agile Manifesto that does not work particularly well outside of software development is the process of less or no documentation. The way to go around this is to create compelling feature presentations that should still include demos as much as possible. However, the demos should be put into context for the executive audience.

Agile Scrum is a great way to increase the value of teamwork, but it is not a one-size-fits-all solution. One has to apply its flexibility in creative environments for it to work best.