q4) When did you start seeing results?
I will have to give a complex answer. Some results were discernible very quickly. Others took quite a long time to materialize.
Three discernible results became very clear within three months:
Our testers became much more knowledgeable on the product(s) almost overnight. Working “real time” with product management and development from the very early stages of product conception, design and implementation immensely enriched their understanding, experience and knowledge.
It soon felt “As if a new sun had arisen”1. Various things were not working well for the business unit before we started Scrum, and numerous team members were quite worried. The introduction of Scrum shifted the mindset from “The world hates us” to “Gee, this stuff [Scrum] is cool!”
In three months we shipped the first Scrum release. It was not a great release, but it was working code at the hands of our customers. Walter Bodwell, the director in charge of the BMC Performance Manager (BPM) summarized the effect very astutely:
“If we used Waterfall on BPM, we would still be in development. We would likely be cutting features right and left to try to bring the date back in. Changes requested along the way by the solutions teams would have been pushed back on rather than embraced.”
In contrast, it really took us one to two years to master various important aspects of Agile. Examples are uniformity in story cards, accurate assessment of velocity and effective Scrum of Scrums. All in all, I would characterize the phases of our methodical progress as follows:
First year – we were learning how to do Scrum on a fairly large scale basis.
Second year – we were starting to be proficient in Scrum.
Third year – we rocked.
Various practitioners with whom I discussed our Scrum evolution felt that the three phase learning curve described above is too slow for executive management to buy into Agile. As this observation indeed is quite true sometimes, whenever I discuss Agile with executives who seem to have a very short time focus, I add a stern warning:
“Don’t agile the Agile!”
1 This phrase had originally been coined to describe the reign of Edward III (1327-1377) in England.
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