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Guest View: Avoiding a clash over Scrum

By Laszlo Szalvay

January 1, 2009 — (Page 1 of 4)
As organizations compete in today’s complex business world, they increasingly turn to agile management practices to respond nimbly to emerging business realities, and to ship releases on time and within budget. One of the most popular agile management methodologies is Scrum, a lightweight framework with relatively few roles, artifacts and meetings.

Unlike traditional project management, Scrum emphasizes adapting to shifting business conditions through iterative and incremental development. By championing the tenets of self-organization, frequent communication and collaboration, Scrum focuses on the team—not the individual—to maximize efficiency and create better products that customers really want.

When organizations catch wind of a competitor’s success with Scrum, it’s easy for them to assume that Scrum drove the success. And often they’re right: Scrum’s iterative, incremental approach to development boosts productivity, reduces cycle time and helps create more successful products.

But what an organization might not realize is how much work is involved in reorienting a company’s business toward Scrum.

Of course, enacting any organizational shift is a challenge. There’s something in the human survival instinct that makes us naturally wary of change. We carry that attitude into the business world, where organizations create routines and processes that may not always maximize efficiency but become part of the company culture nonetheless. A process might be redundant or involve more individuals than is necessary, but it’s still “the way we do it here.”

The familiarity of such procedures and practices gives employees a degree of security in the workplace. So it’s understandable that the changes necessitated by a Scrum transformation would trigger skepticism and resistance.

Not only does Scrum ask that team members learn new terminology, roles and practices, but it also asks people to embrace a new set of values. Scrum adoption asks employees to do more than modify the way they work; it asks them to reconsider how they conceive of work.

Scrum emphasizes teamwork over individual heroism. It champions frequent communication, tight-knit collaboration and a shared commitment to organizational goals. Managers—or Product Owners, in the Scrum paradigm—are asked to resist the urge to micromanage, while team members are vested with the power to self-organize and independently determine how to fulfill sprint objectives.

Related Search Term(s): agile programming, professional development, Scrum

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