scrum is disruptive in your organisation

Scrum is Disruptive in Your Organisation

Shane Wheller CSM

Canberra Scrum User Group

Plan• Agile Manifesto

• A Value Proposition of Scrum

• Value Hunting using Scrum

• Observations of Common Disruptions

Agile ManifestoIndividuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working Software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more

A Value Proposition• Risk inherently controlled

• Closer to the business

• Change accepted as late as possible

• Change inherently welcomed

• Self contained teams

Hunting the Value• Business Benefits still need to be obtained

• Time, cost, quality diamond - quality is fixed, all others are negotiable

• Instead of linear journey controlling scope, go on a journey where scope is variable but quality is not

• Likely outcome is more value faster with agile approach to change

Observations of Common Disruptions

• The challenge is communicating what Scrum is and what it is not, particularly to those that need to know

• Breaking down misconceptions

• In essence, it’s not that we don’t need to consider and deliver traditional work, it’s just that we think of it in a different way


• Scrum is a framework within which the Agile Principles can be used

• Therefore, our approach is ‘different’ to traditional thinking

• This represents change, and change can be threatening to some


• Two types of people:

• “top downers” and

• “bottom uppers”


• ‘Top downers’ still think that they need to control the projects to ensure the Project Brief is delivered and the benefits achieved

• The old habits of waterfall are Scrum’s biggest impediment

• Management roles need to shift to leadership by removing impediments to ensure maximum velocity can be reached


• Effort is made to change Scrum to fit in to the organisation

• Resist this, as all it does is continues to mask all the dysfunctions of the current organisation

• It points out the dysfunctions and doesn’t provide the answers


• Reporting: You’ll be asked for a date, resource utilisation and a timeline, and for really cool traffic lights

• You can provide them, but they’ll be invariably out of date the next day, so of little to no value


• It’s actually harder: Iterative, incremental development is much harder than waterfall development; everything that was hard in waterfall, is now hard in each iteration

• More discussion between team members to enable the shared understanding


• Testing is a point of abrasion

• Generally organisations have testing in place as a QA gate to protect them from poor quality product delivery

• Scrum can deliver higher quality earlier, with built in ‘user acceptance’ if the Product Owner role is functioning

• Iterative approach to ‘Done’ via Paired Programming, Continuous Integration Testing and Test Driven Development and Product Owner Acceptance versus the waterfall approach to Unit, System, System Integration, User Acceptance Testing, and Production Verification Testing


• Product Owner’s are often untrained, don’t own the budget, don’t have a vision and aren’t sufficiently empowered to make decisions

• Organisations are often run by consensus

• Scrum is particularly appropriate for high risk, complex and large projects

References• Scrum is Hard and Disruptive, Ken Schwaber, 2006

• The Scrum Guide TM, The Definitive Guide to Scrum: The Rules of the Game, Sutherland and Schwaber, July 2013

• The New New Product Development Game, Takeuchi and Nonaka, Jan-Feb 1986

Future Meet Ups• Thursday 5 May 6pm - Scrum and Prince2, a

Prince2 Project Manager's Perspective

• Thursday 2 June at 6pm - Scrum “Pecha kucha” (7 Min presentations, time slots still available, see Andrea)

• Thursday 7 July at 6pm - Making Scrum work with Lean and Kansan

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