Do you use Scrum methodology in your organization?
Daniel Engels
12 replies
A recent article shows that the biggest tech companies usually don't rely on Scrum methodology.
Of course, this doesn't prevent them from following some of the Agility principles. But there's no universal adoption of Scrum methodology in Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber, AirBnB etc. (Microsoft is one notable exception, though).
What about your organization? Do you use Scrum?
Replies
Andrey Lipkovskiy@lipkovskiy
We've been using LeSS (Large Scale Scrum) for about 2 years in my previous company and it worked perfectly for 150+ team members.
We tried to implement it before but the first attempt failed as we began to hack it somehow and adopt it to our current processes. From my experience, you can succeed only if you follow all the rules without tweaking the framework.
I can also mention that it's much easier to succeed by getting Scrum pros onboard so they can stay with the team for a couple of months to make sure everything works like a charm
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@lipkovskiy In my experience, there is always a tentation to bend the framework here and there.
@daniel_engels Agreed. For a more specific example - I wonder how agility can be compatible with roadmaps (with deadlines & business objectives)... I guess that when we want the best of 2 worlds, it's not possible to have something that really does work the way we want.
Collabwriting
No, I actually believe that the only product of scrum are demotivated and lazy developers (I've been earning money from programming for the past 16+ years now, and leading dev teams for half of that time)
Kanban, lean and hybrid approaches are more suitable for startups and growing teams.
It's not about the points, it's about the point. And the point is having a fast and motivated team and happy clients 😄
Collabwriting
@daniel_engels for sure, I'm very opinionated, subjective and direct 😅 So no one should take anything I say for granted I just speak from my experience with a no-BS approach 😄
Don't know about the studies but scrum is definitely on a decline especially compared to the hype it had 5 years ago. When it comes to objectivity one of my biggest issues with scrum is that I strongly believe it's simply not objective.
Nevertheless if I would ran an outsourcing agency again, I would most definitely use scrum. But the point of an agency is to clock hours, it's the most profitable approach there is. So scrum removes traction between you and the client and gives you nice graphs to show for your progress 😄
I also work in big b2b programs (more than 500 people) fully setup in Agile (SAFe) model, organized in Release Trains (ART) and Scrum Teams.
Although it's definitely a challenge in big project and large companies, running Agile efficiently is a matter of Cultural Change and Learning Curve adoption that takes time. Therefore the journey can and should start in every situation, but it can take years to full run at speed of efficiency (the Continuous Improvement is btw a pillar of the Agile Way-of-Working).
@giuseppe_di_nuccio do you think Scrum methodology is more adapted to big companies (over 100 persons)? Or as efficient in smaller teams?
@daniel_engels My experience is with both, big companies and small projects. In small teams it works even better because the setup is "lean", and you need probably only one "Release Train" to manage and a Scrum Master per team. Therefore, small-size contexts are ideal for Agile. For larger ones, it's still valid and must-have, but requires more time to reach the efficiency break-point.
When I first implemented Scrum in the late 2000s, in a small start-up (<50 employees), it was incredibly efficient. We liberated developers to actually spend time developing useful features, delivering often and owning the process. Developers had uninterrupted time during sprints, and in turn respected rituals like retrospectives and demos. What we needed the most back then was to empower developers to let them grow their potential.
More recently, and in larger orgs, it seems like developer empowerment has been largely forgotten, and Scrum is more about leveraging rituals, tickets and burndown charts to empower micro-managers.
What once boosted developer productivity by orders of magnitude is now felt as a burden, and the word "Agile" is often use to mean "deliver half-baked features so we can continue to grow that metric".
Also, by now, I'm pretty convinced that Scrum does not scale to large orgs anyway.
@loderunner thank you for this interesting evidence. It is very much what I witnessed too. After years of successful running, it turned into some sort of a cargo cult. I'm not sure if another methodology would solve the issue without a deep restructuring of big organizations though.