Scrum of Scrums

By Luciano Osorio – Scrum Master at Zappts

Free Translation and Adaptation of the original text published on Forbes, written by John Coleman.

Agile methodologies have been part of the IT landscape for decades. Scrum, specifically, emerged in the 90s.

Instead of working isolated in a bubble for months and months, developers are encouraged to work closely with the business. There is release of iterations that continuously improve.

What lessons can businesses in other sectors learn from the experience that IT has already acquired with Agile?

What is Agile and Scrum of Scrums?

Ajay Budhraja is an Agile expert and renowned speaker. He has decades of experience in leadership positions at large companies. According to him, Agile is highly transferable.

Budhraja warned that there are typically associated misconceptions with Agile. “One of them is that Agile will solve all problems in your projects,” he says. “Agile offers techniques. It’s like a subway map of a city. You still have to analyze the information on the map to understand it and figure out how to get from point A to point B. Additionally, Agile still requires basic documentation and lots of planning.”

Challenges of Agile

Agile critics claim that the methodology does not have good scalability, and can even retard solution delivery in an era where everything must come out quickly.

Many of these potential problems can be overcome with strong collaboration between people in the company, explains Budhraja. “Some of the problems I see are: identifying and monitoring inadequately dependencies between teams; lack of planning, especially with geographically dispersed teams; and insufficient focus on change management,” he says.

“Combined with rapid and planned releases, Agile can accelerate solution delivery. Therefore, teams need to work together to make this happen.”

Other Frameworks and Techniques

There are also specific techniques that can help agile practices scale in a larger part of the company. Budhraja recommends Scrum of Scrums, which “brings together many teams in which representatives from each individual team participate in Scrum of Scrums meetings.”

Another technique, SAFe, “is more process-oriented and addresses this in three fronts: team, program and portfolio.”

LeSS, or Large-Scale Scrum, is a lightweight way to scale multiple teams.

The key to ensuring the approach is effective is to work with teams and managers across the organization and balance this process based on the organization’s needs.

What is Important to Build an Agile Organization?

He adds that with agile approaches, tasks change. For example, in Scrum, with the Scrum Master facilitating work results, others who were performing those tasks will be less overloaded.

“With rapid delivery, jobs and tasks change, because there is extreme focus on planning and execution for incremental delivery.”

Agile Results

Ultimately, agile methodologies have improved technology delivery in organizations.

“Agile techniques are fast delivery and I have led large projects with tremendous success in these areas.”

In a web and mobile project that Budhraja conducted using Scrum, there was a 40% increase in delivery speed due to faster cycles. In financial and government projects, the increase was over 50%.

Customer feedback was great for these projects, as the product improved much more quickly.