Where have you witnessed Scrum being used outside of the IT industry?

I had the unpleasant experience of being in a group that applied SCRUM to research. Yes, the work involved software implementation, but research is largely antithetical to SCRUM. Yes, you need good research practices but a key aspect is that you don't know where you will end up. The stand up meetings became 30 minutes twice a week. Arrrg.

Rugby.

It’s a pretty common term on the rugby pitch.

I've seen it turn into utter disasters in tendering large construction contracts on both sides of the fence. I'm usually only peripherally involved, but every time I hear someone runs them in a scrum, it just breaks down.

You can't place a bid with a few less features because you're out of time. You can't break down the process into stories you can close, because one detail can throw all your previous work away. You can't summarize highly specialised work in a stand-up because most people aren't event in the same field as you (listing blockers still works though).

We had something like it in my previous job. Maritime electronics - outfitting ships with radars and navigation systems.

We had a very short meeting every morning to cover the status and the plan. Basically to sort out any blockers or if one project needed additional hands.

I worked for a big commercial real estate company years ago. Think buying and selling whole apartment complexes. We adopted scrum in our IT department, then saw the sales support team start doing it. Each sale was treated like an epic and each task a story. Actually worked pretty well for them.

I have a friend whose team uses Scrum as an internal auditor at a utilities company. Their audits are treated as epics while specific deliverables or findings are stories. After a few weeks of growing pains, he likes it a couple of years after implementation.

Myself? I've had mostly bad experiences working in various IT and Dev roles both as a IC and team manager. Maybe it's because I've been trained on using it, but I still believe in the methodology and blame greedy implementations. I see management/customers count or haggle points, sizes, or hours and it's like staring down a speeding freight train.

The whole 9-5 realm is a joke. To give you an example, I noticed IT bois works on tickets like each email comms are tickets but same is not the case of any other department. If the same was across whole organization, people will be more productive and will be held accountable.

I've dealt with many IT managers, product owners etc and have noticed something that these guys are willing to bend over for smallest of things but with other departments managers, there will be a pushback.

I once heard of a sport called rugby

In education there are self-directed learning centers that follow agile principles with some of the features of SCRUM.