Chapter 20. Human Resources, Facilities, and the PMO

To achieve long-term success with Scrum, the implications of becoming agile must be transferred into other parts of the organization. When this is not done, organizational gravity—those influences that formed the organization into whatever shape it existed in before the start of the transition—will kick in. I have seen Scrum transitions stalled or completely stopped because they ignored the impact of becoming agile on groups outside development. Doing so results in situations like these:

• Human resources. Scrum teams start out doing extremely well until annual review time comes around. Suddenly, everyone realizes they will again be assessed, and receive raises, based entirely on individual performance. The annual review might have one field for assessing whether an individual plays well with others, but at the end of the day individual contributions and heroics bring home the raises and promotions.

• The facilities group. It’s much easier to be agile when the whole team sits together. But when a facilities group makes that difficult, or when it prevents teams from using wall space for burndown charts and other important project data, teams become demoralized. It becomes harder to continue the push toward becoming better at Scrum when it feels like everyone is against you.

• The project management office (PMO). Without thinking about how its project relates to an existing PMO, a Scrum team kicks off with a “damn the paperwork and process” attitude. This creates an enemy out of the PMO, a group that was already uneasy about the organization’s initial, tentative experiments with Scrum. The PMO responds by convincing departmental management that Scrum is OK as long as it is supplemented by a crushing set of documents and practices.