My first real encounter with Scrum (a software development process framework) was in a airplane from San Francisco to Copenhagen in 2002. I read, thought and tried to understand the philosophy of Scrum in 8 hours with too little leg room but enough room for a little brain activity I think the most important thing I adopted was the mindset of the empirical process model.

The empirical model of process control provides and exercises control through frequent inspection and adaptation for processes that are imperfectly defined and generate unpredictable and unrepeatable outputs.

I think the implementation of software mostly fails when managers and customers tries to use a defined process control model – trying to make a safe environment is a quite natural human action but when doing software it normally only saves you from top management and not from project failure

SCRUM defines a simple solution on how to inspect/monitor and adapt to the unexpected. Please remember that simple solutions can be hard to implement (mainly because people need to adapt to a new way of thinking).

Read more about SCRUM at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCRUM