Less WaterScrum more Agility at Agile Amsterdam

Scrum@Scale: The Path to Agile

by Jeff Sutherland | October 25, 2017 | Blog

The Agile Amsterdam 2017 conference started with my keynote on Scrum@Scale. I wanted to make four key points in this presentation:

1. True Scrum is documented in the Scrum Guide which has been highly optimized after decades of iteration based on real-world experience. Some scaling frameworks are inconsistent with the official guide and introduce waste into the system. As a result, they don't scale, particularly if they break the fractal nature of Scrum.
2. Business agility requires scrumming the organization. If a sales team were asked to implement an IT scaling framework, results would not be good. Scrum@Scale solves this problem by supporting all domains. See Scrum in Sales.
3. We learned from Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and host of the podcast "Masters of Scale," that organizations like AirBnB have to start by doing things that don't scale. You need to get a small set of teams doing "twice the work in half the time" and then expand a working model in rolling waves across a large organization.
4. When I polled the Scrum Gathering in the United States, 60% of organizations trying to scale Scrum have waterfall management. They think that agile is something they do in the IT area to make them go faster. To protect the waterfall corner office they implement a translation layer they call a scaling framework that protects their jobs by giving them all the standard waterfall reports. It was interesting that in Amsterdam they do better Scrum. Only 50% of the audience said they were doing WaterScrum.

To learn more about scaling Scrum, you can download the presentation: Scrum at Scale Keynote Amsterdam Sep 2017. Better yet, take one of my Scrum@Scale classes in Boston, New York, Minneapolis, Durham, or Munich.

Also, be sure to join me for a live webinar to launch an update to the Scrum Guide on 7 Nov 2017 where Ken Schwaber and I will talk about changes that reflect the deployment of Scrum across organizations and many domains outside IT.