Darjeelink - Alexis Perrier

Scrum clashes with companies cultures

The biggest obstacle to scrum efficiency is to be found in Company’s culture
A must read interview by Ken Schwaber, one of the signatoriess of the Agile Manisfesto who co-developed the Scrum process with Jeff Sutherland in the early 1990s.
The interview is fully available on the AgileCollab blog.

“However, as organizations and projects flee the existing controls and safeguards of waterfall and predictive processes, they need to recognize the even higher degree of control, risk management, and transparency required to use Scrum successfully. I estimate that 75% of those organizations using Scrum will not succeed in getting the benefits that they hope for from it.

Scrum exposes every inadequacy or dysfunction within an organization’s product and system development practices. The intention of Scrum is to make them transparent so the organization can fix them. Unfortunately, many organizations change Scrum to accommodate the inadequacies or dysfunctions instead of solving them.”

Many of the big companies I have worked for or interacted with are simply too afraid of losing any tiny bit of control in their internal communication processes to consider anything remotely close to Scrum process.

Oftentimes, lack of transparency is not even a inadequacy to be corrected, it constitutes the whole backbone of the company. Control of information, hierarchy driven decision making, micro management and most important so called “political” decisions make it unthinkable to implement Scrum.

In the GoogleTechTalk Ken Schwaber explains how scrum will uncover existing problems, things the company may not want to know and will hide away as soon as it pops up.