Reading Chapter 2 of Mike Cohn’s Book Succeeding With Agile, in preparation for the scrum master course

This week I have been reading chapter two of Mike Cohn’s book Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum. Chapter two discusses the process of ADAPTing to scrum.

The chapter starts off by defining ADAPTing to scrum. ADAPTing stads for Awareness, Desire, Ability, Promotion and Transfer. 

Awareness - Company members need to appreciate that the status quo does not work. This can be because there is a diss-satisfaction in the way a software product is delivered to market, or a beliefe that the way the company develops the product can be improved.

If there is’t an awareness for the desire to change, then adapting to scrum can become very difficult. The awareness needs to be on an organisational, team and individual leve.

The book goes in to great detail about the best ways to comunicate that there is a problem, and change should happen.  

Desire - There needs to be a desire from an individual or group of company members to adopt scrum. Without a desire to adopt scum, overcoming resistance for scrum adoption will be very difficult. People need to understand why scrum methodologies are being introduced to the company, to have the desire to adopt scrum.

Ability- Teams must have the facilities for them be able to learn and adopt to scrum. Members of staff should be able to give feedback to Scrum Masters, Team Leaders, and senior management about the way scrum is introduced and used in the company.

Promotion- To succeed with agile, agile software development needs to be promoted your company, to encourage it’s adoption, and to increase awareness for the software development method. Scrum and agile methods should not only be promoted to software development teams, it should be promoted to all teams throughout the company. For example, promoting agile software development to the marketing team, does not mean the marketing have to adopt the agile methodologies. It does means they are aware the development method, so when the development team adopts it, teams outside of development understand what is going on.

The book, Succeeding with agile, goes in to really interesting ways to promote scrum and agile in your company.

Transfer- The knowledge transfer could come from an outside source, a type of a scrum-and-agile development consultant… However in my opinion the knowledge transfer should happen in-house, with scrum masters training up to understand the best way to use scrum in the company, then passing on the knowlege on to their teams. 

In the next article I will discuss chapter three of the book, succeeding with agile. I will be comparing methods of introducing agile in to your company. 

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Preparation begun, reading Chapter 1 of Succeeding with Agile

In preparation for the Scrum Alliance, Scrum Master Course I am reading and working through Mike Cohn’s book Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum (yes this is an affiliate link, supporting good content). 

I have just completed the first chapter of the book. The first describes the difficulty of introducing scrum in to the work place, and it also discusses the benefits it can bring. It is hard to introduce scrum because people are often resistant to change. However the change can be really beneficial for the working environment, in terms of productivity and jobs satisfaction.   

During the first chapter and throughout the book Mike Cohn adds short sections called “Things try now”, these are practical tasks to do in the journey of succeeding with agile.

The first thing to do is: To identify your familiarity with agile methodology, and to work out what are the obstacles in integrating scrum methods to the team you work with.

Agile methodology is not new to me. I have studied it at university and wrote two articles about it on another blog: introduction to agile software development , and creating an agile project plan.

These are some of the obstacles I believe I will face, and will overcome:

  • Convince the management of the company I work for that using the agile methodologies is a good thing to do. 
  • Persuade my colleagues that using the agile methodologies is a good thing to do. 
  • Pass the understanding to everyone in the company, that a software team cannot operate in an agile way, unless the entire company does, from top to bottom. This does not necessarily mean every department has a scrum every morning, but they should all be aware of the release cycles of software. 
  • Find away to quantify the success of scrums and other agile methods, one they have been introduced. 

The second thing to try is: To gather metrics on things like employee morale, stake holder satisfaction, and time to deliver new features or versions of the product. To be able to build an understanding of the improvements, if any, scrum has brought to the company. Then in three and six months time, gather those measurements again, to work out was adding scrum worth it?

This means I need to decide on metrics to measure, however at the moment, I am not sure what they should be. I will discuss this with my colleagues and work out together what they should be.

In the meantime if you have any suggestions I will be really interested to read them, so please leave a comment, or send me a tweet @farbey! 

In September 2012, I will be taking the Certified Scrum Master course, taught by Mike Cohn. This tumblr is to document my journey from now, until the course, and how I apply what I learn in agile software development to the real work place. The real work place will be at my current job, a software startup that is a year old. 

The video above is a short introduction to scrum, this is just a taster of what’s to come.