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1. Project Abstract:
Google AdWords: The Art of Scrum Quintuple Constraint
Introducing Scrum to Google dWords
| Google is especially proud of maintaining a unique, quirky start-up culture in spite of becoming one of the most powerful companies in the history of capitalism. Roughly 90% of Google’s business is driven by AdWords (GADW), a subsidiary offering advertising services and analytics as a platform. Although their ubiquitous core-business of Search facilitates 3.5 billion queries
per day
, Google is celebrated for much more- from Google X and Google Ventures to Nest Labs and DeepMind. Evidently, Google devised a process for exceptional product development while maintaining the culture of a quirky-startup. Contrary to popular belief, AdWords, Google’s bread-and-butter business, submit to the liberating-shackles of process and procedure afforded by Agile project management methodologies, more specifically with “Scrum,” only eight years after incorporation. This paper will cooperatively examine GADW’s adoption of Scrum and affiliated stakeholder guidance to preserve strategy, structure and execution governed by cost, scope, time, quality and reliability-the “quintuple constraint” of contemporary project management. Sun-Tzu said, “Every battle is won before it is ever fought,” which was recently substantiated by a study concluding that “alpha” managers (in the statistical construct, not in psychology) spend more time in the phase of planning than actual execution(Appendix:9.1.1). Google commissioned Agile pioneer Mark Striebeck to
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experiment. Although Striebeck’s administration wasn’t a categorical success, it was anything but a failure, as Google continues to outperform market expectations to this day, boasting a $5.1B stock buy-back in 3Q15.
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2. Strategic Objectives
The classical principles and standards of “waterfall” project management are simply not conducive to the iterative nature of software development. Writing software, isn’t all too far from like writing this report-many drafts or iterations were produced before the final release, or publication in this case. Borrowing a concept from programming, these productions aren’t a “linear sequence,” or a “plug ‘n chug” of operations- if it were, waterfall management could and should be applied, which is to say classical project management will endure as an alternative to Agile frameworks, like eXtreme, LEAN, Feature-Driven Development (FDD) and in this
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Schwalbe, Kathy (2013-01-01).
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(Clark)