Question #10

How do you get companies to follow scrum? In a CMMI implementation, there is a SEPG that is responsible for both institutionalizing and verifying the processes. This becomes a two prong effort – one to review and revise the process and the other to educate the people. Organizationally, management enforces that they must use this process across all projects, though individual teams can ask for waivers on parts of the process. The SEPG also is responsible for negotiating and granting these waivers.

Usually, any agile method is a collaborative effort. My favorite approach towards enabling an organization is to take a team of curious and energized individuals with a cross functional distribution and level their education with respect to the state of the art in agile methods. Collaboratively, we would pick a point to start from, a point of departure for the enablement - so to speak. Then with Sr. Mgmt’s input, we would pick a pilot project (or two) and begin a process implementation with the team. The pilot should be important and visible enough in the organization so that other individuals and teams would actually take notice of both success and failure.

Across the implementation, we would over socialize and over communicate so that the curious across the organization would watch and become interested. By keeping attention high, the approach would be to infect them with the desire to try something different and then as our successes become visible, encourage them to try it on their own. The expectation would be that the methodology would catch on and spread virally. It is also expected that support networks would be encouraged and grown so that when new teams needed help (whether they knew it or not) there would be both a place they could go for answers and a place from which guidance could come when it was not requested (the collaborative element). This is the truest way for an organization to follow scrum.

Once a critical mass of projects is attained, there needs to be various mechanisms put in place to support and maintain the process and separately to oversee and guide projects to their completion. This is best served by a PMO. Not a classical one, but an agile one. In a classical sense, the PMO is responsible for policing the execution of projects. In an agile sense, there is a more collaborative environment and indeed the function of the PMO is to help the PMs better execute their projects and meet their commitments. It is, shall we say, a retrospective opportunity for the company with respect to how it monetizes its undertakings.