10 Questions generated from Schwaber's Agile Project Management with Scrum

These questions or points were raised by a friend of mine who is an agile novice but has a lifetime of Process Improvement experience and is one of the few CMMI HM Assessors in the country. I find them quite interesting. The responses are mine.


Question 1: Agile makes a lot of assumptions about worker’s behavior. This may be true for some organizations. When it is an older or culturally ingrained organization or has lots of older workers, the SCRUM approach will probably be a challenge to implement.

Many culturally ingrained organizations immediately realize that this methodology is not for them and never attempt the transformation. A subset of them, typically the most interesting subset – such as the Travelers, Sabre, The Gap – realize that they are becoming irrelevant in their industry and must change something. The decision is usually made on the Business side or in Sr. Mgmt. Some how, someone latches onto Agile and decides it is the right path. Rarely does anyone consider whether or not it is a cultural fit for their groups.

In situations like this, corporations that attempt to do a transformation on their own usually find so much active and passive resistance that they are not experienced in over coming that they fail quickly. In organizations that bring in consultants to help with the transformation, I have still seen a fairly low rate of success. I attribute this to the fact that though the consultants can address and over come the active resistance, they are expensive and the passive resistance can and does outlast them. Once the consultants are gone, there is a pretty high probability that the culturally ingrained approach will resurface and the transformation will wither, sometimes leaving the company unable to develop at all.