Brian Rabon contributes some thoughts on aligning your company around supporting Scrum.
Over the last few years I have had the pleasure of training hundreds of people about the benefits of Scrum. My Scrum training courses are interactive and full of practical immersion exercises. Through the process of actually experiencing Scrum, many people often come to the realization that their current company‘s organizational structure will hinder rather than help their Scrum adoption process. Why? Because most Scrum teams today are adopting two to four week sprints. When your time box for getting work done is compressed as it is in Scrum, you actually magnify the impact of issues and risks (aka impediments). If an impediment isn’t cleared almost immediately, then the team’s progress can be severely limited or stopped all together.
For example, suppose your development team is waiting on a test server to be provisioned so they can test their code before moving it to production. If that test server isn’t ready on time, then you have effectively halted the work of the development team. The team may or may not be able to successfully complete the work of the sprint. In theory it is good for teams to clear their own impediments when they can. In practice there are often impediments that they cannot clear. According to a peer of mine, Lyssa Adkins “It doesn’t take long to see that the biggest blockers for Agile teams have nothing to do with the team. They have everything to do with the surrounding organization. Things like the company’s rules, processes and procedures (aka red tape and bureaucratic run arounds). ” Click to continue »
