Scrum is one of the most widely used Agile processes in the US and around the world. Why is this? First of all, Scrum is easy to adopt because it makes sense to development teams and empowers them to deliver value through software products. And, it's also a very practical approach in that it does not prescribe specific development techniques and so it can be adopted by companies with a range of legacy processes and tools in place. From software vendors to corporate IT organizations to offshore consultancies, teams using Scrum are successful in delivering valuable software faster.

Recently, Ken has seen some interesting changes in the way in which companies are adopting Scrum:

Scrum Moves From Grassroots To A Management Choice
For its first fourteen years in existence, most Scrum implementations were bottom up. That is, a development team would start using Scrum. Its customer would see working software at the end of one month. They would be so overjoyed that they would tell a fellow manager. The fellow manager would ask his or her development team why they weren't using Scrum. That team would shift. Team by team, customer by customer, the organization would transform itself to use Scrum and become agile.Over the last eighteen months, I have been seeing top-down implementations of Scrum. A "C" level executive looks to Scrum for competitive advantage and directs its use throughout the organization. This top level support is invaluable for securing the authority required to make this type of change happen and stick. Although I am under NDA for most of these organizations, visible organizations using top-down implementations include CapitalOne, KeyBank, Yahoo, Covad, Siemens Medical, and Siemens Telecommunications. The paradox presented by top-down implementations is that Scrum and all agile processes depend on self-managing teams, the exact opposite of most top-down directives. It will be fascinating to see how well top management executes these directives.

Ken Schwaber is one of the founders of the Agile Alliance, a signatory to the Agile Manifesto, and a founder of the Scrum Alliance. Co-developer of the Agile Scrum process with Jeff Sutherland in 1990, Ken has worked with numerous organizations to help them take advantage of Scrum and trained or helped others train over 3,000 Scrum project managers. Ken has been developing software for over thirty years.

On Sale Now - $36.59

Purchase or reiview this book online at Amazon.com >>

Trackback(0)

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Write comment

Show/hide comment form

Name

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (registered users only)

Write the displayed characters

Add Comment Preview