Announcement to company going scrum

Hi Rick,
What is your role at your organization?
What is your role at your team?
Are you a Scrum Master or Product Owner?

I recommend to raise a topic in advisory or executive meeting that will better than a document or letter.

Hi,
My Role is Product Owner. I work for a big dutch internationaal whole sale company.
I want to sent a mail around in THE company explaning our New way of working. Scrum.
Like an announcement
Many thanks! Very much appreciated
Rick

I'm not exactly sure what you mean though when I last introduced SCRUM to an organisation I hosted a presentation to explain what we wanted to achieve and then introduced scrum as the way we were hoping to achieve it.

Presentation are better, in my opinion, to announcements because they're interactive and have a human face. Remembering that the agile manifesto values "individuals and interactions over processes and tools", you can engage people and fully explain, rather than sending out an email or memo that may not even get read. Additionally, in a presentation, invite people to ask questions, to query how things will be done and maybe even have a workshop when they can try out a little role play and "feel" agile.

I would also tailor the introduction to the presentation to the audience, or example, the board of directors want to know "how much money will this cost me or will I make from it?", the developers want to know "How will this make my job easier and relieve the pressure from people demanding more and more output" and other parts of the business may ask, "How will this affect how I get work from the dev team, is this just red tape?"

Hope that all helps,
Tony

Is your team actually in a position to work in an agile manner within the organization? Is the team capable of owning a piece of work and progressing it during a Sprint without impediment? Has it expressed a desire to do so?

Do you have a clear Product Owner with whom the team has drafted a Product Backlog and agreed a Definition of Done? Will the PO be accountable to stakeholders...or is the team being funded in a traditional project-based way, where a project manager is accountable for value?

Hi Rick, regardless of your role in the organisation introduce Agile to senior management first, this would be a sensible starting point. Top-bottom agile implementations are more successful than bottom-up agile implementations.

The presentation should be in management language and in addition to walking through the SCRUM process, be honest about what it takes to implement agile successfully and what good looks like. Some topics that you could potentially touch on/research about before delivering the presentation:

1) Do you work with third parties, or external partners – how will that impact the success of SCRUM in the organisation? What will be the KPIs for theses partners and how will you engage with them?
2) SCRUM is a means to an end – its mechanical. The end state is to achieve Agility in the organisation. How would you define Agility for your organisation? Where is the business trying to get to, and how will SCRUM help?
3) Teams that are funded on a project basis have a high turnover of staff, especially in large organisations with a high number of contractors/partners. At the end of the project they tend to “let go” staff because they are unable to fund them, until the next project, losing acquired knowledge. Is this behaviour happening in your organisation? Product based teams have continual funding and acquires and retain knowledge.
4) SCRUM focuses on reducing time to market of working software, not increasing how fast developers code. Ensure management understands this.
5) Be clear on the roles and responsibilities in SCRUM and self-organisation. Can the organisation restructure in such a way to enable SCRUM and team empowerment? Is there a need to change culture?
6) Is the PO empowered to make decisions? Proxy Product Owners defer decision making to outside of the team reducing empowerment.
7) How will the architecture organisation align?
8) How will the Business align to Agile? User experience, design, customer testing etc.
9) Is SCRUM the right process? How about Kanban or other flavours of agile?
10) How will the organisation scale SCRUM - there are various Agile scaling frameworks out there.

You don’t need all of the answers to these questions right from the start but you should be clear to the management that the organisation will embark on a journey and it needs to buy in and support the teams for it to be successful and deliver the end goal - Agility.

Jitesh

Don't send mails, but organize meetings and let people experience the power of agile working. To make scrum work, you need to accomplish an cultural change. My second advice is just start doing it, but make sure to involve the key stakeholders in the process and make sure they experience results. My third advice is to seek help. In my company we hired a consulting company to coach all scrum teams and the management as well. This really helps a lot.

Before any organizational change it is worth to check this.

Dr. John P. Kotter - the 8-Step Process for Leading Change. It consists of eight stages:
- Establish a Sense of Urgency
- Create the Guiding Coalition
- Develop a Vision and Strategy
- Communicate the Change Vision
- Empower Employees for Broad-Based Action
- Generate Short-Term Wins
- Consolidate Gains and Produce More Change
- Anchor New Approaches in the Culture