program selection system

Single team implementations are where Scrum is most comfortable. Having successfully adopted Scrum for single teams within the central BBC Future Media and Technology department, we were now faced with the choice of dropping the use of Scrum on a large multi-team project or scaling Scrum up. We chose the latter, despite the fact that neither we nor anyone else seemed to know exactly what was involved. This is the story of how we dragged Scrum kicking and screaming out of its (and our) Comfort Zone.

Using Scrum in single development teams had become second nature to us. We had been working more efficiently and with more transparency than ever. However following a reprioritisation of projects and the initiation of the flagship project, the BBC iPlayer, these teams were having to work together on a shared project for the first time. A change of project management approach was never really an option for us, we needed to stay Agile. However we were faced with the challenge of seeing whether we could scale up the use of Scrum across a large-scale multi-team project. We sought help from the Scrum community, gurus and their literature but somehow no-one was giving us a solution that hung together, so we just went for it. It was uncomfortable for a long while but that’s when we learnt the most. At the end of project we were left to consider whether Scrum as a process will ever be able to grow to provide a clear and complete method for scaling or whether it will always be up to organisations to have to figure it out for themselves.