Scrum has the potential to boost your team’s productivity, but realizing that potential is up to you. Mitch Lacey, agile coach and author of The Scrum Field Guide, explains why ensuring greater success starts with improving your organizational alignment.

In the world of Scrum it’s fairly common for organizations to quickly jump into practicing the agile methodology and then become frustrated or disappointed when they don’t see significant immediate results. Of course, going through the motions of Scrum and actually practicing it effectively are two very different things. In fact, as Mitch Lacey explains in this weeks’ Labcast, the road to the latter starts much earlier in the adoption phase — by establishing the right organizational and team dynamics.

This Week’s Guest

When I’m talking with a senior leadership bringing Scrum in it’s all about organizational alignment. How do we understand the culture that we want? How do we highlight the principles and values more of the competencies that we want within the organization and people to achieve the end goals?

— Mitch Lacey, author of The Scrum Field Guide

Key Takeaways

* To truly make scrum a success, integrate it into your company’s culture and organizational alignment.

* When it comes to reluctant members, stress Scrum’s ability to change the direction of a project so they get what they need.

* Scrum starts at hiring. Don’t hire based strictly on technical ability. Consider competencies.

* Consider two approaches for your Scrum of Scrums: The Bottom-Up Perspective and the Top-Down Perspective.

* Prioritization is key. Meeting with your customers and stakeholder at the beginning of sprints to identify and prioritize issues.

Listen Here

Labcast 122: Scrum Team Dynamics with Mitch Lacey

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Transcript

Kevin: Hello there and welcome to another edition of Labcast. I’m your host, Kevin Caine, and today I’m joined by Mitch Lacey to talk about scrum team dynamics. For those of you who don’t know Mitch, he’s an agile practitioner and consultant and the founder of Mitch Lacey and Associates, Inc., a software consulting and training firm. Hey Mitch, thanks so much for joining me today on Labcast. How are you doing?

Mitch: I’m doing fantastic. Thank you very much for hosting me.

Kevin: Yeah. It’s great to have you here, and I’m excited today to talk about scrum team dynamics. At OpenView, we’re great proponents of scrum, it’s something we use in our organization every day. I know it’s not something that all people use, and so my first question to you is what advice do you offer people who are looking to bring scrum into their organization?

Mitch: Advice on bringing scrum into the organization is an interesting one. I have a large banking customer in Western Europe, and they’re going through this transformation right now, and as you can imagine from a banking perspective, they’re fairly formal in their processes. They have a PMO office and stuff like that, and we see this uprising of teams, where they’re wanting to do scrum and they’re wanting to adopt the agile principles and values, and that’s sort of colliding with upper management,