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.

, as listed in this write up below.
Organizations want to address these challenges. Before you jump to fixing the problems, many                       times organizations  prefer an independent pair of eyes and ears to the review current scrum adoption and provide an assessment of what is working well and areas of improvements. 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.
You need someone who can participate in various scrum rituals as they are being done presently, experience them first hand, interact with a few key stakeholders, collect required information and come up with an independent assessment. This helps management to decide current level of scrum adoption and how much and what needs corrections in future.

The next step from here could be coaching the teams. This is where you can engage “scrum coach” who can actually work closely with teams on the ground. Guide, mentor and coach them to bring out the recommended changes.
Some o f the typical challenges that I have come across include:

1. Some teams are using scrum, not all
2. You still have typical org-structures where centralized component / service teams exist and dependencies across teams leads to schedule risks
3. 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 J
4. Senior management has a strong feeling that there is not enough visibility and also predictability in projects when they are done with scrum
5. Sprints keep missing their commitments, but everyone (pigs) involved in scrum is happy! Management (chickens) doesn’t understand this!
6. So management (chickens) have almost concluded that we are using scrum for quite some time, but we don’t see the benefits!
7. Not everyone is bought into the whole idea of using scrum
8. Burn-down charts don’t burn down till last day of sprint
9. Release plans don’t exist, so no question of release level burn-down – leads to point # 4 & 6 above
10. Stories not small enough, product backlog is not well maintained and refined periodically
11. We don’t see continuous improvement – retrospectives are not effective
12. 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.