Chapter 88. Scrum and Organizational Design in Practice
Fabio Panzavolta
A company that has been around for more than 30 years, with all its organizational habits and practices that were built up over that time, is much too complex a system to change as a whole over too short a time span.
In my work with such an organization, we did feel the need for change toward increased agility, however. We did not feel the need, nor did we have the ambition, to try to change the whole system in one large “Agile transformation.” Rather, we decided to make the transformation we aimed at implicit. We selected one tangible product and introduced Scrum for its further development and evolution.
Our ambitions were clear and twofold: 1) satisfying the CEO’s objectives of improving time to market, quality, and customer satisfaction for the selected product, and 2) revealing what should be improved in the organization.
After one year of experimentation and discovery, including improving the understanding of Scrum for all people connected to the product by using trainings and workshops, we had substantially improved the Development Team’s focus. Not only did this lead to improved quality and speed, but it also enhanced cross-learning within the team. An important hurdle we had to clear for this was getting the organization to accept that the team was now dedicated only to our selected product.
With regard to our second ambition, we revealed important organizational impediments to Scrum. We kept raising them with board members to keep up awareness. Collaboration between Business and Engineering remained an important improvement area. Product ownership was fragmented among too many people, affecting vision and direction. Management decisions to remove impediments tended to be slow. Employees were spread too thin, which limited their capacity to perform and learn from deep experiments. This was caused and worsened by the compliance pressure on employees: their “success” was measured by how they respected internal processes, rather than by indicators like customer satisfaction.
Our many experiments wouldn’t have been possible without all the people seeing the value of Scrum and relentlessly contributing in many ways to our company journey toward more agility. We know the journey will be long. We are gratified over every little improvement we make.
The support, help, and belief in Scrum by one of the board members has proven crucial, however. It is extremely helpful to have a promoter on your side who knows the organization inside and out, is able to open doors, and is willing to try different approaches to help remove impediments. It has been one of the success factors that raised the bar of experimentation at different organizational levels.
I feel we are the living evidence that improving time to market, quality, and customer satisfaction using Scrum is not possible without updating the organization, although Scrum has no rules on what an organization should look like.
I am curious to find out what is happening in your organization: