DZone
Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile
  • Manage Email Subscriptions
  • How to Post to DZone
  • Article Submission Guidelines
Sign Out View Profile
  • Post an Article
  • Manage My Drafts
Over 2 million developers have joined DZone.
Log In / Join
Refcards Trend Reports
Events Video Library
Over 2 million developers have joined DZone. Join Today! Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile Manage Email Subscriptions Moderation Admin Console How to Post to DZone Article Submission Guidelines
View Profile
Sign Out
Refcards
Trend Reports
Events
View Events Video Library
Zones
Culture and Methodologies Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks
Culture and Methodologies
Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering
AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture
Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding
Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance
Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks

Integrating PostgreSQL Databases with ANF: Join this workshop to learn how to create a PostgreSQL server using Instaclustr’s managed service

Mobile Database Essentials: Assess data needs, storage requirements, and more when leveraging databases for cloud and edge applications.

Monitoring and Observability for LLMs: Datadog and Google Cloud discuss how to achieve optimal AI model performance.

Automated Testing: The latest on architecture, TDD, and the benefits of AI and low-code tools.

Related

  • Non-Traditional Project Planning
  • Sprint Goals: How to Write, Manage, and Achieve
  • Compatibility Testing: Checklists and Crucial Things You Need to Know About It
  • Conducting Sprint Retrospective Meetings

Trending

  • Cognitive AI: The Road To AI That Thinks Like a Human Being
  • Exploring String Reversal Algorithms: Techniques for Reversing Text Efficiently
  • Post-Pandemic Cybersecurity: Lessons Learned and Predictions
  • How To Deploy Helidon Application to Kubernetes With Kubernetes Maven Plugin
  1. DZone
  2. Culture and Methodologies
  3. Agile
  4. If You Want to Improve Your Company's Agility, Reimagine Your Scrum

If You Want to Improve Your Company's Agility, Reimagine Your Scrum

It takes quite some persistence and belief to keep fighting the past-world tendency to control individuals.

Gunther Verheyen user avatar by
Gunther Verheyen
·
May. 31, 19 · Presentation
Like (2)
Save
Tweet
Share
9.91K Views

Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

Join For Free

Improve your agility by empowering workers

Happy workers are the result of improving your agility.

Many of today's enterprises are hardly fit to play a leading role in today's world. They are designed on the past-world premises of stability and high predictability, of repetitive work with easily scalable results. They experience profound difficulties having to navigate the predominantly uncertain and unpredictable seas of today's world.

An increase in agility is needed. They adopt Scrum. But rather than updating their past-world structures while introducing Scrum, they twist Scrum to fit their current organization. An illusion of agility is created as a result.

You may also like:  Your Company Culture Is Probably Killing Innovation

Organizations, certainly if they have been around for a while, grew into very complicated and extremely interdependent internal structures. These structures are often the root of the problems organizations seek to resolve by adopting Scrum. Work is essentially seen and organized as assembly line work. Many bodies, meetings, hand-overs, resources, deliverables, processes, and departments are required to produce and deliver even the smallest chunks of work.

Organizations naturally revert to familiar recipes when facing the need to become more Agile, including mass-production and cascaded approaches, separate transformation projects, copy-pasting what other organizations do, or blindly following blueprint prescriptive models.

Individuals are grouped into 'teams.' The teams are 'coached' into complying with standard sets of practices and processes, unified Sprint lengths, and electronic process tools. This is uniformly done across the whole organization, regardless of business domain, expertise, or the technology at play.

Can you imagine Scrum being employed as designed and intended, regardless of your current organization? Do you have the will to deeply reflect? Go back to the 'why' of your Scrum? Face your clear and apparent urgency? And take action? Recover, reboot, re-imagine?

The existing organizational constructs are not touched, or touching them is cleverly obstructed, if not sabotaged. Teams (often micro-sized) are typically established within existing departments or other forms of functional separations. Higher-up optimizations, like synergies across teams and departments, are ignored in the same way they were before. The systemic disconnectedness that used to inhibit collaborative problem solving between individuals now inhibits collaborative problem solving between micro teams.

More Agile teams does not make a more Agile organization.

Practitioners worldwide turned Scrum into the most applied definition of Agile. Despite Scrum being the new reality, most organizations continue struggling with Scrum. They struggle as they think teams can be constructed. They struggle as they try to map Scrum's accountabilities on existing functions. They struggle to understand that inspection without adaptation is pointless in Scrum. They struggle to understand how Scrum can wrap a variety of practices, allowing each expression of Scrum to be tuned to a specific context without fundamentally altering the framework. They struggle to re-invent their organization around Scrum to inject agility in their internal structures, although this will ultimately be reflected in their business outcomes. Organizations lack the imagination to picture how Scrum can work for them, mentally blocked to think beyond their current set-up.

In order to firm up their agility, courageous seekers re-imagine their Scrum to start re-emerging their organization. They leave behind past attempts, choices and approaches (all that didn't work). Over-ambition, magnitude anxiety and deflation angst are mitigated by downsizing to small again and subsequently growing iterative-incrementally. They go through incredibly hard work when they:

  1. Re-consider what the 'product' is for the implementation of Scrum (or select another clearly bounded and meaningful initiative), slicing the initiative if it is too BIG. Repeat.

  2. Re-imagine Scrum for the selected product/initiative/slice.

    • Use Product Backlog as the single plan, holding all development work, whether technical, functional or non-functional. Establish what it means for product Increments to be releasable.

    • Reset the accountabilities to Product Owner, Scrum Master(s), and Development Team(s), full-time dedicated to the initiative and optimizing for the whole rather than for titles, positions, and utilization. The eco-system, this newly established Scrum zone, is facilitated with tools, infrastructure, and space.

  3. Create coherent, small, and tasteful sashimi releases, no later than by the end of each Sprint, through a controlled and automated deployment pipeline.

Courageous seekers take a few Sprints before expanding to a next product/initiative while still improving the existing initiative(s) and relentlessly removing all impediments to the envisioned state of product delivery.

Is an environment in place where people are willing to demonstrate the undiluted accountabilities of Scrum? Are teams self-organizing toward delivering releasable Increments providing start-to-finish value, no later than by the end of a Sprint? Are the teams fully equiped with all skills needed, a dedicated team space, all tools, infrastructure, and authorizations?

It takes quite some persistence and belief to keep fighting the past-world tendency to control individuals. Remind yourself (or welcome others reminding you) that value is in the outcome of the work, not in the volume produced. At the Sprint Reviews, consider the value a team has potentially created in a Sprint, and align with them on what seems most valuable to work on next. Move away from judging individuals for their hours spent on individual tasks. Team Engagement is the key.

People who are engaged actually care a lot more about customer outcomes and profitability.

Continue re-thinking your internal constructions as initiatives grow, new initiatives spin up and start delivering value. Solve further organizational issues and inadequate policies as you run into them. Start re-emerging the organization upon conscious acts of re-imagining Scrum; funding, HR policies, rewards and incentives, governance, quality assurance, sales and marketing, legal and regulatory compliance. Unleash a way of working that will sometimes lead you to quite unpredictable destinies.

It is hard work. It is a path of learning, experimenting, falling, and getting back up. It is transforming how you work, not adding work and complexity to what you already do. It is gradually re-merging your organization towards a networked system of self-sustaining product hubs. A product hub grows or shrinks as needed (following product ambitions and market needs). A product hub is added or disappears as needed (when spinning up or exiting a product). Embed the empirical approach of inspection and adaptation in your managerial practice and in your organizational set-up.

Further reading

The Illusion of Agility (What Most Agile Transformations End up Delivering)

What Is Agility, Actually?

scrum agile Sprint (software development)

Published at DZone with permission of Gunther Verheyen, DZone MVB. See the original article here.

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

Related

  • Non-Traditional Project Planning
  • Sprint Goals: How to Write, Manage, and Achieve
  • Compatibility Testing: Checklists and Crucial Things You Need to Know About It
  • Conducting Sprint Retrospective Meetings

Comments

Partner Resources

X

ABOUT US

  • About DZone
  • Send feedback
  • Careers
  • Sitemap

ADVERTISE

  • Advertise with DZone

CONTRIBUTE ON DZONE

  • Article Submission Guidelines
  • Become a Contributor
  • Visit the Writers' Zone

LEGAL

  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy

CONTACT US

  • 3343 Perimeter Hill Drive
  • Suite 100
  • Nashville, TN 37211
  • support@dzone.com

Let's be friends: