Author Archive

The biggest question looming at the start of a project is, what exactly are we building? We know the general shape of the system to be built. We may know, for example, that we are building a word processor. But there are always dark corners yet to be explored or issues yet to be settled [...]

One of the earliest models for organizational change was put forth by Kurt Lewin in the 1940s. In Lewin’s model, change is a three-step process: “unfreezing” the current situation so that change may occur, transitioning to a new state, and then “refreezing” the new state so that it persists. Many subsequent organizational change models are [...]

Teamwork is at the heart of every agile process. The Agile Manifesto proclaims that we are to favor “individuals and interactions over process and tools” (Beck et al. 2001), meaning great software comes from great teams. Scrum itself derives its name from the view that a product development team should behave much like a rugby [...]

It is perhaps a myth, but an enduring one, that people and their pets resemble one another. The same has been said of products and the teams that build them. The system being produced will tend to have a structure which mirrors the structure of the group that is producing it, whether or not this [...]

There are many different routes an organization can take to adopt Scrum. Fortunately, from looking at companies that have already transitioned, we are able to identify some common patterns of how to do it successfully. In this chapter, we look at the strengths and weaknesses of six patterns, as well as when each may be [...]

Historically, when an organization needed to change, it undertook a “change program.” The change was designed, had an identifiable beginning and ending, and was imposed from above. This worked well in an era when change was necessary only once every few years. Christopher Avery has written, “I think in the 1960s and 1970s this approach [...]

All change is hard. I’ve seen employees in an uproar over something so small as a change in their company’s healthcare plan. Larger changes can be even more painful. But there are certain attributes of transitioning to Scrum that make it more difficult than most other changes. Chapter Contents Why Transitioning Is Hard Successful Change [...]

New titles, roles, and responsibilities aren’t the only changes Scrum teams are asked to make. For a Scrum team to be truly successful, they must go beyond adopting the basic, highly visible parts of Scrum and commit to real changes in the way they approach the actual work of creating a product. I’ve observed teams [...]

The previous chapter focused on the two new roles on a Scrum project—Scrum- Master and product owner. But changes to a Scrum project’s team members go beyond the introduction of two new roles. For example, the self-organizing nature of a Scrum team eliminates the role of the technical team leader, individuals are asked to look [...]

As we discussed in the previous chapter, teams and organizations resist Scrum for many different reasons. One likely source of opposition to adopting Scrum is confusion over the new roles that exist on a Scrum project. The roles of ScrumMaster and product owner are new ones without exact corollaries in the pre-transition organization. It is [...]