Given this, not to mention the hit that the recent economic downturn has had on public radio funding, NPR vice president of programming Eric Nuzum has turned to Agile to develop programs more in tune with what their listeners want in a much shorter timeframe and with a much smaller budget.

"The NPR board gave us a mandate to develop more programming anchored in radio -- which is a really expensive prospect, so I started to think of ways we could reduce the expense and time involved in developing new programming," says Nuzum. "It just kind of happened out of desire to go further, faster, or for less money. I was looking for some inspiration and found it one floor up inside our building (where Digital Media sits)."

The Digital Media team at NPR is heavily invested in Agile, and their success with it has inspired other departments. So far, Nuzum and his team have gone through one round of new program development using the Agile approach, which has resulted in new programs such as the , , and (a podcast). Nuzum estimates that the Agile approach has resulted in these programs being developed for one third of the usual cost.

While their Agile implementation so far has been fairly informal ("Agile-inspired would be a good way to describe it," says Nuzum), they plan to use a more structured approach this fall when they start another round of experiments. So far the results are good: in addition to time and costs savings, Nuzum says they've iterated and changed the shows constantly to incorporate listener and station feedback. "We've had a tremendous amount of success," he says.

The idea of using Agile -- in particular, the Scrum methodology (a particular implementation of Agile) -- for non-software development isn't so surprising, considering where it came from in the first place, says one of the founders of Scrum. The idea for Scrum was first hatched by two Japanese business professors observing traditional manufacturing companies (Honda, Toyota, 3M) using . In the mid-1990s, Sutherland and his colleagues at Easel Corporation formalized the process for software development and gave it the name Scrum.