How to get Scrum Right on First Attempt

Test the waters with a single Sprint full Scrum experiment

Pilot objective

Within the Scrum community, there is abundant writing suggesting that the two main factors of Scrum implementation failure are: (1) sub-optimal team structure at the onset, and (2) the Scrum Team failing to reach critical formation maturity early on. I second this observation from my own experience.

Failure itself is welcome in Agile, and all is good if the Scrum Teams can validate the learnings from the false start and adapt to improve. The trouble is that after a few Sprints of lackluster performance and failed launches of second and third Scrum Teams, many organizations (a) eventually give up on Scrum (with the “Agile doesn’t work” bitterness) or (b) continue with half-baked Scrums resulting in demotivated teams (i.e. “Zombie Scrums“).

So, is this a team problem? Actually, this is more of an alignment problem: misalignment between concurrent organizational values and Scrum values. In short, Scrum is a transformation from project management to product ownership culture:

Scrum is…

• Empirical instead of predictive. (In contrast to the plan and predict all-the-way nature of waterfall project management, Scrum is a practice of evidence based management.)