How to stay sane when the world is changing

Agile lives up to its promise to put a spot light on organizational problems and inefficiencies. In our focus group meetings we’ve identified several processes that will have to change once we move to Agile. The discussions on these processes have accelerated with first Agile pilot project kick-off as the new team had to know how to deal with defects, how branches and build environment will support Agile environment, what Definition of Done is and how development artifacts are created an managed. 

We approached this by creating spinoff teams that consisted of folks from different teams and locations and were lead by Agile Focus Group members. Each team spend some time on researching their corresponding subject and came up with proposal for next steps. These proposals were presented to Agile Focus Group and actual action plan was put in place. In addition to being very effective way to address many issues in short period of time, this approach presented an excellent opportunity to be engaged in the Agile transformation to the team members who otherwise wouldn’t be involved in the transformation for several months. In addition, the energy and momentum were maintained at high levels, which was essential for keeping the program going at the good pace.

While changes to existing processes will be driven by problems uncovered and challenges presented by Agile, there will be much temptation for modifying the Scrum framework as certain things will not make sense initially.

A word of caution when making changes to the framework. I particularly like the following quote by Ken Schwaber “I estimate that 75% of those organizations using Scrum will not succeed in getting the benefits that they hope for from it… The intention of Scrum is to make [their dysfunctions] transparent so the organization can fix them. Unfortunately, many organizations change Scrum to accommodate the inadequacies or dysfunctions instead of solving them”.

One needs to be careful when considering adapting the framework to their own context. In my opinion, its paramount to keep an eye on Scrum values when making changes, and the likelihood of success will be much higher.