Scrum has shown itself to be a successful approach to software delivery in small organisations. There is sufficient enthusiasm to lead people to wonder if it can be scaled successfully to work at the enterprise level. Scrum has not had rapid uptake in large organisations, because large organisations are suspicious of its ‘self-organising’ nature and lack of rigid control. Simply the fact that Scrum does not have a recognisable project plan leads some people, often those working in the Project Management Office (PMO), to view it with hostility. Where hostility exists within the organisation, it is little wonder that Scrum teams fail to thrive.
To some degree the antipathy with which the PMO function views Scrum is mutual. This is captured in the 2001 Agile Manifesto, which can be viewed as a software engineer’s charter that bemoans the obstacles put in the face of programming teams by ‘Dilberesque’ corporations.
In order to succeed in the new economy, to move aggressively into the era of e-business, e-commerce, and the web, companies have to rid themselves of their Dilbert manifestations of make-work and arcane policies. This freedom from the inanities of corporate life attracts proponents of Agile Methodologies, and scares the begeebers (you can’t use the word ‘shit’ in a professional paper) out of traditionalists. Quite frankly, the Agile approaches scare corporate bureaucrats, at least those that are happy pushing process for process sake versus trying to do the best for the “customer” and deliver something timely and tangible and “as promised” because they run out of places to hide.
Jim Highsmith (2001) from [http://agilemanifesto.org/history.html]
The opinion expressed by Jim Highsmith is undoubtedly, in some cases, true. Where it is true, Scrum will struggle to make in-roads. Where the organisation is driven by the market and less by the needs of the organisation to service itself, Scrum has more of a chance in scaling to the enterprise. Ultimately for Scrum to work, things have got to change, and everybody knows that change is difficult. It is unlikely to happen driven from the bottom up without support and direction from the top. Perhaps one definition of an organisation that is Dilbertesque is the characteristic whereby it is dominated by layers of middle management and senior management becomes remote. So it is impossible to define scalable enterprise Scrum without first defining the characteristics of the organisation where Scrum can flourish. A seed cannot grow in soil that will not support it.
As an aside, the interested reader would do worse than to read:
(http://monster-island.org/tinashumor/humor/corpmemo.html)
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