Your First Transition to Scrum May Need to Evolve in Stages

Are you having trouble with your transition to scrum? Is it difficult to get everyone on board with the agile mindset? Sometimes it’s better to just dive in, do what you can and work out the kinks as you go along. We’re agile, right? Don’t overthink it. We can help our co-workers become more agile as we work through the process.

However, just because you don’t practice every aspect of scrum at start of your team’s transition, does not mean we advocate a hybrid approach. We recognize that ripping off the waterfall bandaid can be painful. So, sometimes you have to start without 100% understanding and buy in.

Don’t wait. Keep your eyes on the prize. The ultimate goal is to practice all aspects of scrum, but first recognize that scrum is a continuous learning method.

I recently worked on a project where the development team complained that the business kept changing their minds about requirements, even through final user acceptance testing. Sounds familiar, right? We all know that in the waterfall world change should be avoided this late in the game. The first phase of the project wound up delivered 6 months late. And guess what? The business still wanted more changes.

I suggested to the team that the second phase begged for an agile approach. So, for the next round of enhancements, which were significant, we went agile. Phase 2 was already underway when we made this decision, but we scrambled anyway to transition to scrum.

We set up Jira as the tool to manage the work. We planned for our first sprint by walking through the high-level requirements and defining the epics and potential stories. To be honest, it wasn’t pretty. The team kept trying to create stories out of tasks instead of deliverables. I spent a lot of time reiterating the concept of slices rather than layers (check out Chapter 3 of the GSD Handbook about story writing).

Our first sprint actually took us about 4 weeks to adjust to the new 2-week sprint format. We didn’t close any stories for the first 4 weeks. However, it was amazing how the daily standups served to bring the team together and smooth the work into an efficient rhythm. The product owner was engaged, the tester stayed involved with everything that was going on, and the development team began to flourish. A forum to ask questions and receive immediate answers to questions saved a ton of rework. In the end, implemented a significant number of large enhancements in almost half the time it took us with the original effort.

Now, as we begin to prepare for our next project together, we are formalizing our team contract and retrospectives. We now are ready to practice the scrum ceremonies as intended. Phase 2 was considered a success and the team is excited about scrum and agile.

Everyone agreed that jumping in (kicking and screaming) to become agile helped the team transition to scrum and adopt and agile mindset, which now everyone can see pays great dividends.

Have you had any experiences like this? I’d love to hear them!

Gerri Slama Grove

Gerri Slama Grove
GerriG@gsd.guru