Foreign glimpses
…in a large organization, scrum initiatives are popping up all over the place—it's catching on like wildfire and an early majority is emerging. A corporate angel supports the growing effort. Many people are new to scrum and are eager to start. A swarm of scrum coaches are helping teams to get on track, but still, demand is greater than supply.
✣ ✣ ✣
You want to jumpstart the growing number of beginning scrum teams, even with limited resources.
Forces:
- Even a swarm of scrum coaches cannot meet demand.
- New teams are eager and willing, but not yet able, to start with scrum.
- Seeing, experiencing a scrum wall, burn down chart, product backlog and hearing anecdotal evidence from battlefield tested scrum master and product owner is inspiring, convincing and energizing.
- You quickly want to increase internal references.
- Avoiding mistakes and pitfalls already made by others and not reinventing wheels can speed up evolutionary processes.
- Mimicing successful teams are excellent external evidence and often is a better investment than trying it all by yourself.
- More internal teams on track are candidate to lead by example, converging demand and supply.
Therefore:
Organize an educational bus tour for beginning teams to visit existing large scale scrum environments and let teams glimpse those foreign efforts. Monkey see, monkey do often inspires teams to quickly adopt the practices seen at other places. Have the scrum coach follow up by guiding the team into action as soon as they get home.
✣ ✣ ✣
The bus tour or excursion may include things like presentations, question and answer sessions, talking to different scrum teams about their scrum boards and experiences. With a larger group, you may even consider organizing a world café or fish bowl dialogue. Remember to do food.
Once exposed to successful other teams, they can start with core scrum and evolve their own processes from there. Still, make sure a scrum coach helps them get and keep on track. But they always should plan your own journey. The scrum coach is like a travel agent, a catalyst.
Cultivate the teams so that it sticks, and they, in turn, become candidates for jumpstarting other teams. this part needs work
✣ ✣ ✣