In May I attended the Lufthansa Project Management Workshop near Frankfurt and then ScrumDay in Stuttgart. My keynote for both conferences was on the Shu, Ha, Ri of Scaling Scrum.
At the Scrum Gathering in San Diego, I gave an earlier version of this presentation and polled the audience of over 1000 people. Two-thirds of the Scrum practitioners present indicated that their organization was in the Shu, or beginner's state. I found the same percentage was true at ScrumDay in Stuttgart.
In the Shu state, the Scrum implementation is led by waterfall management who want to give waterfall orders and receive all the old waterfall reports. The management often implements a so-called "scaling framework" to serve as an interface layer between the waterfall and the Scrum. Agile is viewed as something that management thinks makes developers go faster, even though they have no idea what it is, having never practiced it.
The Ha, or intermediate state, is practiced by all sustainable Scrum implementations at companies like Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce.com, Spotify, or similar organizations. The management leads and supports the Scrum implementation by allowing the Product Owners to drive product strategy and product backlog. Management moves to the side of the traditional hierarchy.
In the Ri state or expert state, the entire organization is Scrum. We see this in companies like Saab and Systematic. The senior management team is an Executive Action Team with a daily Scrum meeting to remove any organizational impediments.
Video of the ScrumDay presentation
Click here for a PDF copy of slides Scrum at Scale Keynote Scrum Day Stuttgart May 2017.
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