Common Pitfalls When Implementing Scrum for Enterprise
Hey guys, Anatoly from Define Agile here. We have a pretty serious topic today. Brad asked me this question on Quora. Thank you. That is an amazing question.
“What are the common pitfalls when implementing Scrum at an Enterprise?”
Yes, of course, nothing is really easy. I’ve been able to implement Scrum multiple times in Fortune 500 Enterprises. However, there are definitely some issues. What are the most common ones?
I’ll start with the biggest one right away – stakeholders. In a Waterfall organization stakeholders often are very reluctant to accept the change. So whenever one department says they want to do Scrum, stakeholders usually say, “We don’t want anything to change in our process. So, how we communicate with you should stay the same”.
How to solve this ? What I find very useful is to get a “round table” with them, explain the new process, explain the benefits, make sure they understand Agile well – that helps a lot.
Second issue – people in a team who used to work in certain way for years. This might be challenging. To solve this you need to establish trust, and really explain the value of Agile.
The third challenging thing is that even though teams have direction to move to Agile, many people don’t understand what Agile actually is.
In order for you to move teams through the Agile transformation, all people in a team need to understand what Agile is and some people need to evangelize Agile, otherwise, it just does not work. We are not talking only about developers here – your manager, his manager need to understand it as well.
This third point is exactly why companies like Define Agile exist. Our main goal when transforming any team is to teach Agile to everyone, so that if you are doing Scrum, any team member can be a Scrum Masters, and others can pass the Agile knowledge forward.
So If you are planning to go through an Agile transformation , I would highly recommend you to hire a partner to do this. It is a very important step, and if done wrong, can demotivate everyone.
Hope that helps,
Anatoly