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Scrum Guide and Agile Manifesto emphasize some of the following:

  • Teams are cross-functional and have skills to create a Done increment.
  • People are to be trusted
  • Work is to be at a sustainable pace
  • Entire organization must respect Product Owners decisions

My question is are there any guides, resources, whitepapers on the transition from a non-Scrum to Scrum environment when certain players can not be trusted, are not skilled enough to be on a team, do not want to give up control of their fiefdom (middle manager), have no respect for lower ranked workers?

Quite a bit of Scrum seems naive. I am attempting to read and analyze how to handle transitions when there are actors that can not be part of Scrum.

e.g. Director of QA who wants department resources kept off of Scrum teams. Or, during Scrum adoption, Director of QA position is discovered is not needed. I have not read anything that deals with this scenario, or similar scenarios

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  • 7
    Remove the bad actors.
    – Philip Kendall
    Oct 27, 2021 at 12:46
  • What flavor of Agile will you be using? Kanban, SaFe scaled agile? Etc.
    – Anthony
    Oct 27, 2021 at 12:49
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    Add to the list that Scrum assumes that people are interchangeable and everything can be broken into tasks that can be completed independently in a few days or less.
    – ojs
    Oct 27, 2021 at 12:57
  • Scrum’s naivete or the user’s?
    – Solar Mike
    Oct 27, 2021 at 13:20
  • 2
    This is not a question for Workplace. I would suggest asking on the Project Management site.
    – DJClayworth
    Oct 27, 2021 at 14:58

3 Answers 3

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You can't change to an agile process without having organizational buy-in. It sounds like a small section of your business has attempted to force agile without having that buy-in.

Once you have that organizational buy-in, the answer to "Director of QA who wants department resources kept off of Scrum teams" is that the Director of QA leaves, either voluntarily or not; similarly for your middle managers.

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This isn't an Agile activity; initiating Agile involves Organizational Change Management.

Change Management is as hard as doing Agile. There are entire books about it. The idea of those assumptions is that your organization needs to makes those happen prior to implementing Agile. It needs to be its own project.

The key aspects of this are:

  • Identify Stakeholders
  • Identify changes that affect the stakeholders
  • Analyze impacts
  • Make changes
  • and during all of this, communicate, communicate, communicate

I suggest that is your organization that is naive in thinking they can just declare Agile is in place without first meeting the prerequisites.

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Scrum does not remove accountability, it increases it, and makes the bad actors stand out. Scrum is not a hands-off approach to project management, it is very hands on.

accountability is agile

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