Agile or scrum has been a big fuss now a days! Most of the leading software product development companies have already moved to scrum. However, whichever organization I have interacted with, I came across some typical challenges, like –
- Some teams are using scrum, not all
- You still have typical org-structures where centralized component / service teams exist and dependencies across teams leads to schedule risks
- Organizations not willing to dissolve such teams. Typical claim is that, “we use service oriented architecture” and can’t change org-structure! But scrum should work.
- Senior management has a strong feeling that there is not enough visibility and also predictability in projects when they are done with scrum
- Sprints keep missing their commitments, but everyone (pigs) involved in scrum is happy! Management (chickens) doesn’t understand this!
- So management (chickens) have almost concluded that we are using scrum for quite some time, but we don’t see the benefits!
- Not everyone is bought into the whole idea of using scrum
- Burn-down charts don’t burn down till last day of sprint
- Release plans don’t exist, so no question of release level burn-down – leads to point # 4 & 6 above
- Stories not small enough, product backlog is not well maintained and refined periodically
- We don’t see continuous improvement – retrospectives are not effective
- We find surprises in the middle of sprint! Only when we start coding, can we find exact changes needed!
These are just some of the challenges listed and not a complete list. Organizations want to address these challenges. Organizations also prefer an independent pair of eyes and ears to review current scrum adoption and provide feedback. And there comes the need of hiring someone who is experienced enough in scrum as a process, who has just enough experience of all these challenges and has addressed these challenges in the past. Someone who can teach, mentor and also coach the team to keep becoming better with scrum.