If you want to keep up with the pace of innovation enterprise...
Scrum may seem like it was built for the software development world, but its benefits go way beyond developers. Businesses are starting to realize that if they want to keep up with the pace of innovation, they need to change the way they work outside of development. And that involves Scrum.
Companies can no longer work in a predictable annual cycle. Annual planning, assuming that the plans work, trying to predict that plan, and trying to control it is the wrong way to run business.
It’s not just competition forcing this change; people simply don’t want to work in that way anymore. It’s almost impossible to hire really good technical talent who [aren’t] able to work in [an agile] way. People are keenly aware of what happens in a waterfall methodology, and they don’t want to do it in their day-to-day job.
Scrum is a lightweight approach to doing complex work in small increments. It allows teams to work together in small groups and deliver something in a short amount of time. There is just enough of a framework there to allow people to collaborate around delivering the right thing in short cycles, and room to evolve into what makes sense in a particular context.
This way of working is not limited to the software development world, and it was never intended to be dominated by software developers. Scrum is not a software development method. It never was. Scrum is a management method. It is just a way to manage in a way that you are constantly inspecting and adapting. Where can you do that? In marketing, in compliance, in human resources, in finance, and throughout your organization.”
Enterprise that's use Scrum is a co-evolutionary, empirical, subsumption-based management framework to deliver the most business value in the shortest amount of time while balancing the benefits for all people involved, based on an abstraction, generalization, extension and parameterization of Scrum for generic, business, technique-pluggable, and scaled management purposes.
Scrum is a process framework that has been used to manage complex product development since the early 1990s,” they wrote on ScrumGuides.org. “Scrum is not a process or a technique for building products; rather, it is a framework within which you can employ various processes and techniques. Scrum makes clear the relative efficacy of your product management and development practices so that you can improve.”
Times have changed. If you don’t make the right decisions, if you don’t implement the right technologies, if you don’t innovate fast enough, you are done. You will disappear. Your competitors in your industry are disrupting the industry, so you are either on the disrupting wave or you will be shattered by the disruption wave.
Traditionally, businesses have worked in a linear process where they did extensive upfront planning, then spent months to deliver a working product. Scrum transforms that way of working by creating cross-functional teams that work together in an iterative way toward the same goal. It changes the entire business, leadership, culture, mindset, projects, programs, innovation, and architecture.
“How does that scale? That scales with a lot of consideration and thought going into the process of how the company truly operates. From there…you can start to map tools to it.
The first thing to understand is that Scrum simply works. What doesn’t work is when the business says it needs to build something in 18 months, and then hopes it comes through on time, in budget and within scope. What does work is having a short-term commitment that can work within two weeks with smaller teams having to rely on themselves to get things delivered.
“Once you start to see that success take place and start to see it take place in multiple teams, then there is a notion of, ‘Okay how do we actually corral this and get better enterprise success?’
Unfortunately, there is no out-of-the-box solution or right way to go about enterprise Scrum. “The same way your teams don’t do things in the same way within your organization, organizations aren’t going to do things in the same way.
It starts with a willingness to working in a different way. “There isn’t any structural thing that needs to be in place; it is just a desire to work in a different way.”
Scrum reveals issues, and people don’t always want to deal with them. “Sometimes they blame Scrum for it rather than seeing that it was really just a mirror that showed them how they were working already.”
We tend to stay away from the term “scaling Scrum” because it implies it has to start in software development when it doesn’t. The important thing is having the right mindset and understanding you will have to manage unpredictable work. “If you have a leader who has the mindset that everything is predictable, and now [they] are just going to add some Scrum to that they are probably not going to be very successful using it because that is the wrong paradigm.”
Companies can begin to get value within their existing structures by prioritizing their work in short cycles, doing retrospectives, and using some of the mechanics of Scrum, Lawrence explained. But in order to get the real breakthrough of Scrum, leaders have to decide how far they want to go. “Do they actually want to try to build a cross-functional team that includes a variety of skills? Or do they want to stick with the existing structure and just practice the basic framework?
In addition to executive leadership buy-in, middle management also has to get on board, according to cPrime’s Ng. Middle management’s way of working changes dramatically because they are no longer the command and control, he said. They instead become more of a coach empowering the teams and setting goals for them instead of dictating things to them and holding people accountable. The alignment of what the business wants to get out of Scrum and how it is changing the way things work needs to be understood by everyone in the company.
Enterprise Scrum’s adds that you cannot change into something you don’t understand.
A good idea is to carve out a piece of the organization and start your agile efforts there instead of going agile all at once, according to Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum and CEO of Scrum Inc. However, if an organization chooses to do so, it needs to understand that waterfall and agile are like two different operating systems, and in order for agile to really work, the organization needs to implement a completely separate leadership team and set of rules.
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