Scrum Agile Project Management

Enterprise Scrum Transformation

Adopting an Agile approach in a software development organization requires more than just sending some people to a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) course. In this article, John Hill provides six recommendations for an enterprise Scrum transformation.

The article is based on the experience of the common issues that John Hill has encountered over the years with Scrum implementations. He realized that they could be largely solved by five specific recommendations I frequently make. The remaining recommendation is to make sure that the recommendations are first integrated by the management.

After discussing the context of Agile adoption in enterprise, John Hill proposes his six recommendations that are summarized below:
1. Rewrite job descriptions for Scrum Roles
2. (Re)train staff on new roles before attempting a Scrum implementation
3. Reorient performance reviews to encourage team building and promote cross-functional behaviors
4. Revise criteria for new hires by ensuring that assessments evaluate the individual role as a team member
5. Determine “business value” for user stories
6. Obtain leadership approval and support for recommendations 1 through 5

His conclusion is that “although following these six recommendations won’t cure all of the problems across all five facets of the Agile enterprise, success can be better ensured for an Agile framework (Scrum in particular) to deliver smaller increments of software more frequently with higher quality than was possible prior to implementing these changes. Going into an Agile transformation, we must also recognize (up front) that these changes represent very real threats to the status quo, require initial buy-in and support at the leadership level, and could take time.”

Read the complete article on http://www.scrumalliance.org/community/articles/2013/2013-april/six-recommendations-for-an-enterprise-scrum-transf