Doing proper Scrum not Scrum-didly-um
Hi All
Im in the middle of helping to implement agile for an organisation who have just started to use scrum.
So far so bad,
There doesn't seem to be any real though gone into it, literally a few scrum boards have gone up with" to do, In Progress and Done swim lanes". There are 5 dev teams in total who work on the core backend code and platforms.
The attitude among the development team is that they will work it out as they go along and that it's failrly easy to to do scrum.
My view is that you need to standardise the scrum process, standardise your configuration tools, (TFS), internal wikis and that each team should be flexible within certain boundaries. At the moment all the back logs look different on TFS, some dev teams are following "some" elements of scrum and my personal view it has multiple points of failure and people will start to point the finger at scrum.
I champion the fact they have taken the initiative shows there is potential for self management but at the same time question the approach.
Thoughts.
I recommend the use of physical boards in the first instance because they are a flexible, highly visual, and tactile learning tool. All of the various electronic boards on the market have their problems, and there is a real danger that new teams will constrain their thinking in terms of a tool's limitations.
In short, I'd expect a high degree of flux and variation to begin with (which you appear to be seeing), but I'd also expect the teams to be identifying and sharing lessons learned.
The dev teams appear to be practising ScrumButs, not Scrum. Without using the standardized Scrum framework's requirements (rules, roles, events, artifacts), how would the rollout team know whether Scrum is working or not -- since every team is using a different ScrumButs implementation. The value behind Scrum is that the ineffieciencies and problems of (the organization, its product management, engineering, testing and deployment processes, management sponsorship, organizational change management) are exposed very early in the rollout life-cycle.
Are the Scrum Masters in each Scrum Team experienced in Scrum?
Is there a rollout team driving the Scrum implementation across the organization -- if yes, are there experienced Scrum Masters in the rollout team?