You either go full Scrum ahead or avoid it completely – overcoming Agile adoption challenges

When Scrum is adopted in an organization, there is always a certain degree of resistance to the change. A small group of people may resist Scrum and try to bad mouth it and create dissent among other people. These people have to be identified and brought on board quickly, otherwise it can quickly affect the morale of the organization. 

 Another challenge emerges due to people who resist passively. They go along with the Scrum methodology, but only as a form of lip service. They will look like they are participating and following up, but they only do the bare minimum. This inertia of a few people can disrupt entire Scrum teams, and cause the Agile adoption to fail.

 A still bigger problem with adopting Scrum, is the trap of an IT-only Scrum adoption. This results in a complete disconnect between IT and business, which eventually results in more processes, more delays and discord between business and IT, and also within the traditional Project Manager-team structure.

 This Water-Scrum-Fall trap results in a dangerous partial adoption. IT tries to become Agile, whereas the initial assessment part and the final shipping and go live part stays very process heavy. Thus the organization still functions in the traditional sequential waterfall way, while IT gets scrunched in between, trying to adopt Scrum. This is bound to fail, and in fact turn into a series of feature breakdowns, more elaborate processes and serious discord within the organization.

 To tackle the problem of resistance, whether active or passive, it is essential to create a sense of urgency and inevitability amongst the people. It has to become a ‘adopt Scrum’ or ‘go your way’ situation. The impending need to adopt Scrum has to be uniformly communicated. The reason could be that it is the only way to stay afloat amidst increased competition or that the organization is completely transforming, lock, stock and barrel.

 The bigger answer to all these challenges is to adopt Scrum completely for the entire organization. Either every part of the organization including management and senior leaders have to go for it, or it should not be done at all. This full adoption requires the senior management to not just be trained in Scrum, but to also become evangelists who will drive the new methodology. Scrum completely changes the way a traditional organization operates, changing the roles as well as the team structure. The shift to self-governing teams, means that managers will have a different role and loss of authority. This role-change too has to be tackled effectively.

 There is no half-measures when it comes to Scrum. Every part of the organization has to adopt Scrum together, and all senior leaders have to be trained, and the adoption has to come from within - essentially, every person has to believe in it.