Trying to save a Scrum implementation using Lean Principles and Artifacts
After three and a half years of using Scrum and still providing inconsistent quality and not getting better, we are embarking on an attempt to improve by using Lean ideas and modifying our Scrum implementation. For some time now, our attempts to make Scrum work for us have mostly failed. Scrum out of the box, in a company with over 100 developers and testers, was not working as expected. This presentation is a report of our efforts to improve our Agile approach by using Lean and other ideas.
We started by re-training all our teams and discussing with them the Lean principles and implementing several changes:
- Move product owners to a separate department and get them closer to the customers.
- Moving away from a Task centric point of view to a Business Value point of view. Stop talking about tasks and tell me about the stories.
- No more weekly Scrum of Scrums, lets bring all Scrum Masters to meet every day for 30 minutes, so we can discuss our impediments every day.
- Agile Retrospectives do not work. Let’s do a Lean retrospective instead. Create a backlog of impediments and put it in priority order. Use value stream mapping to find the biggest impediment (wait). Use 5 Whys to find the real root cause. Use Demming Cycle (or Wheel) PDCA to remove one impediment at the time.
- Stop the Top-Down management approach and make your teams really self-managed.
How are we doing? Come to the presentation and find out.
This will be a typical powerpoint presentation where we will go over the history of our Scrum implementation. We will answer questions and show some data and examples of the work.