I recently attended a Birds of a Feather session at Tech Ed 2011 in which the discussion was “Is Scrum Better for My Projects”. A birds of a feather session is simply an open forum where a bunch of people interested in hearing from their peers come to discuss. There’s a moderator and a facilitator who help discussion flow as well as encouraging experienced members of the group to come up front to answer questions. This particular discussion quickly changed from “Is Scrum Better for My Projects” to “Why Does Scrum Fail To Launch” I guess you could say.
For me this hits home because my first experience with an Agile methodology was very challenged as well so I was really engaged here. In the Birds of Feather discussion several guys who seemed like very experienced project managers and developers got up to give their opinions. The first of which was a fellow who noted that management invading their daily stand-ups to attempt to get schedule updates were seriously challenging them. Additionally the managers said they weren’t going to ask questions or interfere in any way but of course they did. Another gentleman stood up with a comment about removing distractions. He also pointed out that management needed to completely understand the reason for the stand-up and that they should schedule a different meeting. The managers should also understand that the stand-up was for the team.
So far it sounds like we’re making some progress right? Well I think we did on the whole. However after about an hour the moderators asked the panel to note one thing that they think is most important to do first to preventing scrum from failing. The two above gentlemen and another who showed up a little after all said “create a backlog”. For me it was like “wait what?” but the session was over and that was the closing.
This is wrong. These guys were very intelligent and experienced and had a great discussion but when put on the spot about the number one thing to prevent failure they said backlog even though they started with management not understanding. To me based on my experienced combined with their stories the problem is definitely management not understanding and project managers not having crucial conversations with these managers as risk mitigation to be sure their software development methodology would succeed. Many IT managers who’ve been doing the same job since before Agile got big still think Waterfall. Unless you get them to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing they’re always going to step on your toes and your Agile/Scrum will be challenged.
Scrum seems to fail often due to project managers failing to create a common understanding about how the software is going to be developed. You can’t just send them an email with a link to a long list of boring Scrum/Agile articles; you have to do true risk mitigation and make sure they understand how it works. Further you need to have them agree ahead of time on their update schedule as well as the contact point for quick updates which is NOT THE DEVELOPERS. This should all be set forth before the project ever begins. Finally if managers cross the line or are replaced through the course of the project you need to have the crucial conversations necessary to facilitate understanding. Management understanding and buy-in ahead of time will make the adaptation of Scrum/Agile far more likely.
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