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Introducing scrum in a waterfall environment

Last post 01:17 pm September 20, 2017 by Timothy Baffa
2 replies
Kristian Leonhard
08:01 am September 19, 2017

We have a wish to try to introduce Scrum in one of our development departments, but have a number of challenges we are not sure to solve. If someone could point us in the right direction it would be very nice.

We are producing a very complex enterprise product and we have 2 product owners, 10 developers and 4 testers.

We have 4 releases each year which consists of 20-30 change requests ranging from 10 - 1500 hours each. We are bound by a fixed price contract which requires us fixed deadline, scope and price on each of these changes. Besides the change requests we also do bugfixing. The release cyckle is fixed and we have to deliver installable packages every 3 months + a number of service packs and hotfixes.

Some of our challenges we are facing are:

- We have many small changes which only takes a short time for one person to do

- We have some specialized technologies that only a single person knows and can't easily knowledge transfered

- We have alot of urgent hotfixes that requires immediate fixing

- We have fixed budgets on each change and have strict rules on warning and raising budget as soon as we see it.

Questions:

- How can we handle urgent hotfixes in the middle of a sprint?

- How do we handle the specialized technologies developers which often has tasks on alot of different change requests - which would mean they need to be in multiple teams? Or small 1 man teams (makes no sense)?

- How is the delivery manager integrated with the scrum teams, so we can report progress, budget issues etc. with the client? Notice that the product owners are not capable to do this job.

Regards

Kristian

Ian Mitchell
08:05 pm September 19, 2017

When you say "We have a wish to try to introduce Scrum in one of our development departments" can you clarify how far that collective desire extends? Does it extend to business, management, and the clients with whom there are contracts?

Is it understood that the implementation of Scrum is likely to require change across the enterprise, and not just in a "development department"?

Timothy Baffa
01:17 pm September 20, 2017

Perhaps the desire/goal should be to work in a more Agile fashion, as opposed to piloting Scrum (square peg) into existing processes (round hole)?

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