Issues Transitioning to Scrum

Learn about the issues commonly faced by teams when transitioning to Scrum.

Teams need to learn how to address practical implementation issues—geographic distribution, legacy systems, product support, challenges filling new roles, and so on.

During an initial Scrum implementation, a team can feel that it’s slowing down. In reality, the team is more quickly encountering work that it should have been doing more frequently in the first place (work that used to stack up at the end in Sequential projects or was just not visible). As the team becomes more skilled working incrementally, it will feel its speed increasing.

A Scrum scorecard

For the sake of assessing fidelity of Scrum implementations, we have found it useful to score Scrum projects on the most important Scrum success factors. The figure below shows the example of a Scrum star diagram that was presented in the course’s “Introduction” (in the “About This Course” lesson).

The diagram uses this key:

Key

Description

0

Not used

2

Used infrequently and ineffectively

4

Used occasionally with mixed effectiveness

7

Used consistently and effectively

10

Optimizing

The solid line reflects the average practice my company has seen through consulting and training with slightly more than 1,000 Scrum teams since 2010, biased toward what we have observed in the past two years.

The ...