Agile at Scale with Scrum: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Come hear the story of how a business unit at one of the world's largest networking companies transitioned to Scrum in eighteen months. The good-more than forty teams in one part of the company moved quickly and are going gangbusters. The bad-an adjacent part failed in its transition. The ugly-if you're in a large company with globally distributed teams, it's not hard to torpedo Scrum adoption. Steve Spearman and Heather Gray describe Scrum adoption challenges for a multi-million line, monolithic system developed across multiple locations worldwide. They share the techniques and tools that helped them implement Scrum in just two project cycles and the reasons part of the company failed to make the leap. Find out how they gained critical executive support, moved from component-based specialization to Scrum's generalizing specialists, found enough ScrumMasters, adjusted to twelve-hour time differences, and dealt with classical PMOs. Take away concrete approaches to improve your enterprise agile conversion-and an appreciation for problems you will surely face.