Scrum Teams in Finance: How to Apply Agile Sprints to Non-IT Departments?

For department heads in finance and marketing, the pressure to increase speed and responsiveness is relentless. In search of a solution, many look to the tech world and its embrace of Agile methodologies like Scrum. The promise is alluring: faster turnarounds, better team collaboration, and a greater ability to adapt to changing priorities. However, applying a framework designed for software development directly to a non-IT department often leads to frustration, not efficiency. Teams get stuck performing rituals—daily stand-ups, sprints, retrospectives—without seeing any real improvement in their output.

The common mistake is focusing on the ceremonies of Scrum while ignoring its foundational principles. The problem isn’t that Agile doesn’t work for finance or marketing; it’s that simply copying the practices without adapting the underlying mindset is a recipe for “Zombie Scrum”—a state where the team goes through the motions but the spirit of agility is dead. It’s not enough to create a backlog and run sprints; you must fundamentally re-engineer how work is prioritized and how decisions are made.

But what if the true key to agility wasn’t about adopting rituals, but about systematically redesigning your team’s decision-making authority and aligning its feedback loops with tangible business value? This guide is for leaders who want to move beyond the superficial application of Agile. We will deconstruct the core challenges of implementing Scrum in non-technical environments and provide a disciplined, collaborative framework for building a truly agile finance or marketing team that delivers measurable results.

For those who prefer a visual primer on one of this guide’s central roles, the following video offers a concise explanation of Agile product ownership. It’s a foundational concept for ensuring your team is always focused on delivering the highest business value.

To navigate this transformation effectively, we have structured this article to address the most critical questions and challenges you will face. The following sections provide a clear roadmap, from establishing the right leadership roles to diagnosing process failures and making agility stick.

Why a Finance Scrum Team Needs a “Product Owner” to Prioritize Tasks?

In a traditional IT Scrum team, the Product Owner (PO) is the voice of the customer, responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Development Team. When applying Scrum to finance, this role is not only retained but becomes even more critical. A common failure point is appointing a project manager or an IT liaison as a “proxy” PO. This is a mistake. The Finance PO must be a business leader with genuine authority over the work being prioritized. They must understand the financial implications, regulatory requirements, and strategic goals intimately. Their job is not to manage tasks, but to own the “what” and “why” of the team’s work, creating a backlog that directly drives business outcomes.

The adoption of agile is already significant, with 58% of financial services organizations using Agile always or often, yet many struggle by miscasting this key role. The PO is the single point of accountability for the backlog. If they need to constantly seek approval from a finance director for every prioritization decision, you haven’t created an agile team; you’ve just added more meetings to a hierarchical process. This person must be empowered to make real-time trade-offs and decisions. They translate the department’s strategic objectives—like “reduce month-end closing time by 10%”—into a prioritized list of work items for the team.

A global insurer’s transformation provides a powerful example. They successfully implemented cross-functional Agile teams by replacing IT proxy product owners with actual representatives from the finance business unit. According to an analysis by Bain, this shift resulted in shorter development cycles and dramatically improved collaboration between the business and IT departments. The key was empowering individuals who had a deep understanding of the business value and the authority to make decisions, turning the team from a task-execution unit into a value-delivery engine.

How to Run a Retrospective That Fixes Process Issues Instead of Just Complaining?

The Sprint Retrospective is arguably the most important event in Scrum for a non-IT team. It is the designated time for the team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint. However, in finance or marketing departments, these meetings can easily devolve into unstructured complaint sessions where frustrations are aired but nothing fundamentally changes. The key to an effective retrospective is shifting the focus from subjective complaints to objective, data-driven analysis. Instead of saying “We’re always waiting on data from the sales team,” a high-functioning team quantifies the problem: “We lost a cumulative 3 hours this sprint waiting for sales data, which represents a cost of X dollars and delayed our forecast by two days.”

This shift from anecdotal grousing to quantitative analysis transforms the conversation. It forces the team to act like process engineers, not just employees. The goal is not to create a long list of action items but to identify one or two high-impact process experiments for the next sprint, complete with metrics to measure success. A powerful technique for this is the “5 Whys,” where the team repeatedly asks “why” to dig down to the root cause of an issue rather than just addressing its symptoms.

The following table contrasts the traditional, ineffective approach with a data-driven one, which is essential for making real progress. This structured method moves the team from simply identifying problems to designing and measuring solutions, a core tenet of genuine agility.

By instrumenting the process, the team can have a concrete discussion based on facts, not feelings. This approach not only solves problems more effectively but also builds a culture of continuous improvement and accountability, which is critical for creating a truly agile finance function.

Kanban vs Scrum: Which Agile Framework Fits Best for Accounting Workflows?

While Scrum is often seen as the default Agile framework, it is not always the best fit for every type of work, especially in a finance department. The choice between Scrum and Kanban depends entirely on the nature of the workflow. Scrum is designed for complex projects where work can be planned in time-boxed iterations (Sprints) to achieve a specific goal. It thrives on discovery and iterative development, making it ideal for projects like implementing a new financial reporting standard or redesigning a forecasting model. The fixed deadline of a sprint creates a helpful sense of urgency and focus for a dedicated project team.

On the other hand, much of the work in an accounting or finance department is not project-based but is a continuous flow of operational tasks. This includes activities like accounts payable, expense report processing, and responding to ad-hoc analysis requests from executives. For this type of work, Kanban is often a superior framework. Kanban focuses on visualizing the workflow, limiting work-in-progress (WIP) to prevent bottlenecks, and maximizing the efficiency of the flow. There are no prescribed sprints or roles; the emphasis is on delivering a continuous stream of value and making process policies explicit. It provides transparency into where work gets stuck and allows for flexible prioritization as new, urgent tasks arrive.

For many finance teams, the optimal solution is not a rigid choice between the two but a hybrid model often called “Scrumban.” As one expert from the Institute of Management Accountants notes, this approach allows a team to use Scrum for its structured, complex projects while managing the constant influx of operational tasks with a parallel Kanban system. The following matrix, adapted from guidance on establishing agile finance teams, can help you decide which framework best suits different types of financial work.

The Zombie Scrum Risk: Signs Your Team Is Doing the Rituals but Missing the Agility

One of the greatest dangers in an Agile transformation is “Zombie Scrum”—a state where a team is technically performing all the Scrum events but lacks the spirit of agility. The team has daily stand-ups, sprints, and retrospectives, but there is no energy, no collaboration, and most importantly, no tangible improvement in business outcomes. This is particularly common in non-IT departments where the rituals are adopted without the underlying principles of empiricism and self-organization. The team looks alive, but it’s just an empty shell going through the motions.

Recognizing the signs of Zombie Scrum is the first step to curing it. A key symptom is when the daily stand-up becomes a status report for a manager rather than a synchronization and planning meeting for the team. Team members report what they did yesterday and what they’ll do today, but there’s no discussion of impediments or collaboration to meet the Sprint Goal. Another major red flag is a fixation on “velocity” (like story points) without any measurement of the actual business value being delivered. The team might be completing a lot of tasks, but if those tasks don’t move the needle on key business metrics, it’s wasted effort.

In finance, a classic sign is simply wrapping the month-end close process in a “sprint” without any effort to deliver value incrementally. The entire sprint is a black box, with a “big bang” delivery on the last day, which defeats the purpose of iterative feedback. Finally, if the team cannot make any meaningful decisions without escalating to leadership, it’s a clear indicator that agility is absent. The stakes are high; a Deloitte report reveals that only 38% of transformation projects in finance meet or exceed their ROI expectations, often because they fail to achieve true operational agility.

To avoid this fate, be vigilant for these warning signs:

• Daily stand-ups become status reports to managers rather than team synchronization meetings.
• Sprint velocity is tracked, but the business value delivered is never measured or discussed.
• Core business processes (like month-end close) are simply wrapped in sprints with no attempt at incremental value delivery.
• The team cannot make any decisions without escalating to departmental leadership, creating constant bottlenecks.

Two Weeks or Four? Determining the Ideal Sprint Length for Marketing Teams

One of the most frequently debated topics when applying Scrum outside of IT is the ideal sprint length. Software teams have largely standardized on two-week sprints, and many organizations try to impose this cadence on their marketing or finance departments. This is often a mistake. The length of a sprint should not be arbitrary; it should be determined by the frequency of the feedback loop that is most meaningful to the business. The core purpose of a sprint is to deliver a potentially shippable increment of value and get feedback on it. Therefore, the question to ask is: “How often can we meaningfully create a finished piece of value and learn something from it?”

For a marketing team, a two-week sprint might be perfect for running a series of digital ad campaigns, where performance data is available daily and adjustments can be made quickly. However, for a team focused on content marketing or event planning, a two-week cycle might be too short to produce a significant piece of work (like a whitepaper or a webinar) and gather meaningful feedback. A three or four-week sprint might be more appropriate, allowing enough time to produce, launch, and analyze the results of a larger initiative.

In finance, the natural business cadence is often monthly. As a case study on agile finance functions highlights, many finance teams find success with monthly sprints that are aligned to their reporting cycle. The Sprint Goal can be “A successful and on-time monthly close,” allowing the team to focus on that critical business objective. In parallel, they can run shorter, two-week sprints focused exclusively on process improvement initiatives. As Scrum co-founder Ken Schwaber states, the cadence should feel natural. According to an Agile guide by Atlassian, he advises: “Sprint length should be determined by your feedback loop frequency. If decisions are made based on monthly financial results, a monthly cadence is more natural than forcing artificial two-week cycles.”

How to Use the DACI Framework to Clarify Who Actually Makes the Decision?

Hierarchical decision-making is the single biggest impediment to agility in a corporate environment. Teams can be highly motivated and efficient, but if they have to wait days or weeks for a manager to approve a minor decision, all momentum is lost. To solve this, you must make decision-making authority explicit. The DACI framework is a simple yet powerful tool for achieving this clarity. DACI is an acronym that stands for:

• Driver (D): The person responsible for driving the decision forward. This is often the Product Owner or a team lead.
• Approver (A): The one person (and it must be only one) who makes the final decision and is accountable for it.
• Contributors (C): People with expertise who provide input and are consulted, but they do not have a vote.
• Informed (I): People who are notified of the decision once it is made but are not involved in the process.

Before kicking off any significant project or even the first sprint, the team and its leadership should sit down and map out the DACI roles for the types of decisions that will be made. For example, the Product Owner might be the “Approver” for all backlog prioritization decisions, while the department head is the “Approver” for any single item that requires a budget over $50,00. This simple act of clarification removes ambiguity and empowers the team to act within defined boundaries. It replaces the bottleneck of “I need to check with my boss” with the clarity of “I can make this decision myself.”

The impact of this can be profound. A pan-European bank, as detailed in an analysis by Bain, resolved critical decision bottlenecks by implementing the DACI framework. They explicitly defined that the Product Owner had full authority over backlog prioritization, while the CFO retained “Approver” status only for items exceeding €100,000. This simple change reduced approval delays by an incredible 60%, dramatically increasing the velocity of the teams.

When Is the Best Month to Launch a Consumer Product Crowdfunding Campaign?

This question, seemingly unrelated to internal finance processes, is a perfect real-world problem for an Agile marketing team. A traditional team might try to answer this through lengthy market research reports or by relying on gut feelings. An Agile team, however, would treat this question not as something to be answered in one go, but as a hypothesis to be tested and validated through a series of focused sprints. The goal is not to find the “perfect” answer upfront, but to use an iterative approach to gather data and increase the probability of success.

The process could be broken down into several sprints. Sprint 1 could be focused on “Audience & Competitor Analysis.” The team’s goal would be to build a clear persona of the target backer and analyze the launch timing of the top 5 most successful and unsuccessful competing campaigns. The output would be a data-backed list of potential launch windows (e.g., “Q1 post-holiday slump vs. Q3 back-to-school season”). This delivers immediate value by narrowing down the options based on real market data.

Sprint 2 could then be dedicated to “Interest & Seasonality Testing.” The team could run small, targeted ad campaigns on social media during the potential launch windows identified in the previous sprint. The ads would drive traffic to a simple landing page to collect email sign-ups. The Sprint Goal would be to “Identify which month generates the highest conversion rate and lowest cost-per-lead.” At the end of this sprint, the team wouldn’t have a gut feeling; they would have hard data showing when their target audience is most receptive to their product category. This iterative, evidence-based approach is the essence of applying agility to a complex business problem, transforming a high-stakes guess into a calculated, data-driven decision.

Agile Decision Making: How to Remove Bottlenecks in Corporate Hierarchies?

The ultimate goal of implementing Agile in any department is not just to use new terminology but to accelerate the delivery of value. The primary obstacle to this is almost always the corporate hierarchy and its associated decision-making bottlenecks. To truly become agile, an organization must shift from a culture of permission-seeking to one of empowerment within clear boundaries. This requires a conscious effort from leadership to delegate authority downward, trusting teams to make decisions closest to where the work is happening. While this can feel like a loss of control, it is the only way to unlock the speed and responsiveness that Agile promises.

Frameworks like DACI are the starting point, but true empowerment can be cultivated with tools like “Delegation Poker.” In this exercise, leaders and their teams collaboratively decide on the appropriate level of delegation for different types of decisions, ranging from “Level 1: Tell” (leader makes the decision and informs the team) to “Level 7: Fully Delegate” (team has full ownership). This makes the boundaries of autonomy explicit and gives the team the confidence to act without fear of overstepping. The economic cost of decision delays should also be made visible to leadership. Quantifying the cost of waiting for an approval can be a powerful catalyst for change.

By systematically dismantling these bottlenecks, you transform your department from a slow-moving hierarchy into a network of empowered, fast-moving teams. This is not about eliminating management, but about evolving the role of a manager from a day-to-day decision-maker to a coach and impediment-remover. The result is a more resilient, adaptive organization capable of responding to market changes with speed and precision. This is the real ROI of an Agile transformation.

Your first step is not to pick a tool or schedule a ceremony. It is to honestly assess the current state of decision-making within your department. Start today by using the DACI framework to map out a single, recurring decision process and identify its primary bottleneck.