Scrum is often implemented at the team level, which can limit achieving business agility at scale. Moving beyond this "team-level agility" to a more holistic approach fosters in-team and inter-team collaboration, aligning with the "second wave of Agile":
Five Reasons To Elevate Scrum
Overcome Limitations of Team-Level Scrum: Solely implementing Scrum at the team level can create silos and hinder cross-team collaboration, leading to dependencies, integration issues, and slower delivery.
Achieve Business Agility: Elevating Scrum enables organizations to respond to changing customer needs and market demands more effectively by fostering collaboration and alignment across multiple teams working towards shared business goals.
Enable Innovation: By breaking down silos and promoting a holistic view of product development, elevating Scrum empowers teams to experiment, learn, and adapt more quickly, leading to increased innovation and better customer outcomes.
Optimize for Flow and Learning: Elevating Scrum involves optimizing for both flow efficiency (delivering value quickly) and outcome orientation (focusing on business results), resulting in a more adaptable and resilient organization.
Enhance Human Potential: Moving from task-focused work to a more collaborative and outcome-oriented approach, elevating Scrum enables individuals to contribute their full potential and derive greater satisfaction from their work.
How to Elevate Scrum?
Establish a Single Product Backlog: Instead of separate backlogs for each team, create a single product backlog reflecting the organization's strategic priorities and customer needs (OKRs work nicely here), aligning all teams towards shared goals and reducing dependencies.
Empower Product Owners: Ensure Product Owners understand customer needs and business objectives, and are empowered to make decisions that optimize value delivery. Elevate their role from managing team-level backlogs to owning a broader scope that aligns with business outcomes.
Foster Cross-Team Collaboration Implement practices such as multi-team product backlog refinement, shared sprint goals, and joint sprint reviews to facilitate knowledge sharing, collaboration, and alignment across teams.
Promote Shared Ownership: Encourage teams to take ownership of a broader scope of work that extends beyond their immediate areas of expertise. This involves cross-training team members, promoting a culture of learning, and breaking down silos between development, testing, operations, and other functions.
Focus on Business Value Delivery: Define and track metrics that measure the organization's ability to deliver business value, such as customer satisfaction, revenue growth, and time to market. Use these metrics to guide decision-making and continuous improvement efforts.
Continuously Adapt and Improve: Regularly assess the organization's product development maturity and identify areas for improvement. Experiment with new practices and tools, using data and feedback to drive continuous adaptation and optimization.
By implementing these steps, organizations can elevate their Scrum practices from team-level implementations to a more holistic approach that unlocks the full potential of agility and enables them to thrive in today's rapidly changing business environment.
Contrasting Team-Level Scrum and Elevated Scrum
Team Level Scrum | Elevated Scrum | |
Mapping per Org Topologies | Typically: A2 or A3 | Moving Towards B3 or C3 |
Focus | Primarily on feature delivery within a defined scope | Shifting from a feature-centric to a holistic product or business area focus |
Structure | Multiple Scrum teams, often structured around specific technologies, components, or feature sets | Moving away from rigid team structures towards more fluid and adaptable models, such as a "team of teams" working collaboratively on a shared business area |
Product Backlog | Teams maintain separate product backlogs, leading to potential dependencies and coordination challenges | Transitioning to a single, elevated Product Backlog encompassing a broader scope of work and fostering a unified product vision |
Product Owner | Each team has a dedicated Product Owner focused on maximizing value within their team's scope | Ideally, a single, senior Product Owner with a strategic perspective and authority to make decisions across the elevated scope |
Top challenges of Team-Level Scrum:
Siloed Work: Teams may operate in isolation, hindering cross-team collaboration and leading to a fragmented product vision.
Limited Adaptability: Responding to shifting priorities or emerging opportunities may require significant effort due to static team structures and backlogs.
Dependency Management: Reliance on other teams for specific skills or components can introduce bottlenecks and slow down value flow
Key benefits of Elevated Scrum:
Enhanced Adaptability: Teams can easily adjust their focus based on evolving priorities reflected in the unified backlog.
Improved Flow of Value: Breaking down silos enables smoother collaboration, reducing dependencies, and accelerating value delivery.
Greater Business Alignment: Aligning all teams to a shared backlog and strategic goals increases the impact and relevance of their work.
Increased Learning and Innovation: Teams are encouraged to acquire new skills and collaborate across disciplines, fostering a culture of continuous learning and innovation.
Key Considerations When Elevating Scrum
Leadership Buy-in and Support: Elevating Scrum requires a significant shift in mindset and organizational culture, necessitating strong leadership support to overcome resistance and drive transformation.
Shared Understanding and Alignment: Establish a shared understanding of the target operating model, the rationale for change, and the implications for different roles and teams within the organization.
Gradual and Iterative Approach: Transforming to an elevated Scrum model is best approached iteratively, starting with smaller pilots or experiments to validate assumptions and refine the approach based on learnings.
Key thing to note: elevating Scrum is an org design change. Hence, your management must be involved in this activity, their mere blessing and delegation won't make it a successful transformation. They need to own it and be elevated in their thinking as well.
(C) 2024, Flemm & Krivitsky
