Scenes from a Scrum Transition

By means of nine scenes in the life of a Scrum Enterprise Transition, this ebook summarises some of our experiences in helping organisations to transition to agile methods. All of the scenes are based on what actually happened, although they took part at several different organisations.

The main body of the book is based around the following nine scenes:

• Kickoff and Pilot, where a coach and the sponsor of the transition talk about what the motivation for adopting agile methods (objectives) and the choice of a pilot project.
• Enterprise Scrum Decision, where the early results are discussed with the CEO of the company, and a decision to organise the introduction of agile methods using Scrum is taken.
• The Transition Backlog, where the transition's product owner and a coach discuss the transition backlog (i.e. product backlog for the transition).
• Roadmap Planning, which shows how the innovation game “Prune the Product Tree” can be used to give the transition a little more structure.
• Dimensional Planning, which shows how transition epics can be broken down into smaller user stories that provide tangible benefit to the organisation by the end of every sprint.
• Human Resources, which shows how some of the “human resource management” issues such as incentives and job descriptions need to tackled during a large-scale introduction of Scrum.
• The Works Council Intervenes, illustrating the importance of getting the Works Council on board.
• Agile Engineering Practices, which shows how resistance comes from unexpected places sometimes.
• Success and Outlook, where the sponsor and coach reflect on progress so far and discuss the next steps.
  

For each scene, the dialogue between the protagonists is followed by a short commentary where we discuss the issues further.

Downloads

Version 1.21, 15.10.2012:

The ebook is available in pdf, mobi (for Kindle) or epub (for iPad) versions.

Simon Roberts is a founder of ScrumCenter GmbH, and is based in Berlin, Germany. He is an agile coach and Certified Scrum Trainer with a background in software engineering. He has applied Scrum (almost always with eXtreme Programming as an embedded part) since 2002 and lightweight/agile methods since the late 1990s.

He is currently focussed on helping executives in large organizations to achieve their goals through the use and support of agility. He advocates a combination of Radical Management, Scrum and Kanban in achieving these goals.

Website: simonroberts.de
Twitter: @srob

Stefan Roock is a senior consultant with it-agile, based in Hamburg, Germany. Since 1999, he has taken part in dozens of projects as a developer, coach, consultant and trainer. He has in-depth experiences with Scrum, Kanban, eXtreme Programming and Feature-Driven-Development.

He is an author and speaker on agile topics and is a Certified Scrum Trainer.

Website: http://stefanroock.de
Twitter: @stefanroock