April 9th, 2008
Scaling Scrum: the alcoholic perspective
“Scaling agile is the last thing you want to do” — Martin Fowler [ref]
Everybody wants to scale Scrum. It seems like one of the first questions asked on many CSM courses. Day one, 11am: Yes, but how can I make this work with 5,000 people across 27 world-wide locations? Well, perhaps you can begin by listening for the next 1.8 days.
Too many people want quick solutions to hugely complex problems before understanding the basics. Learn about Scrum, I mean really learn, before jumping to impossible scenarios and expecting Scrum to have pat answers. Software engineers are bright people, sometimes too bright. We praise those who can leap ahead with their thinking, who skip steps; we look to them as the smartest of us all. But Scrum does not benefit from step-skipping, it benefits more from a one-foot-in-front-of the-other approach, embodying learning along the way.
I believe Scrum to be self-scaling. By that, I mean that Scrum contains all the elements required for handling complexity: self-organization, empiricism, prioritization and timeboxing. Scaling Scrum does not benefit from interference, but rather from support and understanding. Develop a deep and thorough appreciation of the Scrum principles and practices. This will allow you (as manager, director, Scrum Master) to step back and allow scaling to happen according to Scrum principles, rather than to fit your own perceived patterns of what is right. Don’t attempt to influence the change, but gently guide it to meet specific organizational and team needs. In other words, get out of the way.
There is an interesting parallel for self-organized scaling from the world of self-help groups that I’d like to briefly introduce here. In 1935 Bill Wilson and Dr Bob Smith formed a group in Akron, Ohio to help alcoholics like themselves recover from the obsession, or disease of alcoholism. From this small, self-organized group (there were no therapists, counselors or leaders) grew an entire, world-wide movement now known as Alcoholics Anonymous. How did this happen? How were a bunch of drunks able to apply the principles of self-organized scaling to their movement without someone being in charge? The answer is that the solution emerged slowly and according to need.
Bill Wilson eventually moved back to New York, and being unable to attend meetings of his newly formed Akron group he began a second, local group. This group grew too, and a similar thing happened. Groups formed from a common beginning according to the needs (usually geographical) of the members. Groups dissolved too, when the need was no longer there. Eventually someone had the idea that a set of guiding principles would be useful to give an overall sense of cohesion to the disparate groups and thus the “12 Traditions” of AA were established by a loose collective of people from many different groups. Among the guiding principles in these “traditions” are the following:
- Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern
- Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or AA as a whole
- Each group has but one primary purpose — to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers
It will easily be seen how such principles can apply to the scaling of Scrum:
- Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern (no change there)
- Each Team should be autonomous except in matters affecting other Teams or the organization as a whole.
- Each Team has but one primary purpose — to build an increment every iteration and deliver it to the Product Owner (who is possibly suffering!)
There are other AA principles that could perhaps be applied to the nurturing and development of individuals or to the design of an Agile organization. The full text of the 12 Traditions can be seen here.
It may be argued that this example is too far removed from the world of software to be useful. Perhaps you are thinking that recovering alcoholics are not responsible for deadlines and deliveries. But think again. Without AA many of those alcoholics would be dead. Avoiding death is probably the best deadline of all. There is certainly a sense of urgency that permeates AA meetings. It is a last refuge for many. This is it: we recover together or we die alone. Don’t be too quick to dismiss the parallel here on the argument of non-relevance. As they say in the rooms of AA: look for the similarities, not the differences.
April 9th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Tobias – Kudos on an excellent post. I think you nailed it perfectly in terms of people wanting to jump ahead on something without first establishing a foundation.
April 9th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Tobias,
I couldn’t agree more. I have found great similarities with the 12 steps and scrum. Two of the primary ones is “one day at a time” and “fake it to make it”; that is, just keep moving…
Most of what we need outsiders to do is remove impediments to movement, or at least not be an impediment to movement. Many of our process thingies exist to prove to business that our team is moving, and to get them away from us so that we’re allowed to move in our own ways.
Same stuff, different day…
Dan
April 9th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Of course its relevant. Scrum, like AA, deals with basic esoteric truths, truths that cut across boundaries.
For example, empiricism in Scrum–”the continuous inspect/adapt process that allows both workers and managers to make decisions in real time, based on actual data, and as a result respond quickly to ever-changing conditions in the surrounding environment”–is essentially the same thing as the Serenity Prayer: “God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
In esoteric philosophy, one might simply say: Be Here Now, which means be conscious of the moment, of the conditions of the moment, and how they might change, and adapt with awareness, with an open heart.
I like how this sort of philosophy, by its very nature, encourages compassion and adaptation.
April 11th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
‘Scaling’ Scrum has always struck me as a rather strange notion. It presupposes that organizational systems are entirely fractal, with each larger subdivision of it merely an exact replica, in the large, of the smaller one. Think of the idea that young children are simply small adults. A moment’s reflection (and experience!) inform us of just what a mistaken view this can be.
However, I too am frequently asked to help organizations ‘scale’ Scrum, before they have even adequately gained their footing in its most elementary foundation. Basically, all I can say at this point is “Well, let’s see how things go.” How can I, they, or anybody know what an organization, whose development is supported by Scrum, will look like, will need, 2 years from now? That is, how can I, or anybody know, what profession my now 2-year old son might enter?
“Well, let’s see how things go.”
April 12th, 2008 at 3:27 am
I have the same phenomenon in my classes and I will answer more or less the same: First learn the principles than try to go to the next level.
For me the more important was to understand why they do ask this question? Is it really because they do have large projects. Are there really all this big companies with these monstrous projects? — Then I started to read Friedmanns book: “The world is flat” And the answer is so obvious that I was embarrassed that I did not have seen it earlier: These people are confronted with a new reality: The globalization of our industry and they try to find ways to work in this new environment. They are seeking guidlines, helpful hints.
The question they ask is not: Show me how Scrum solved the outsourcing thing that we do — the question is rather: We do have a problem. We need to work with people across the ocean but we have no clue. Does Scrum has an answer?
And then we do make the mistake: We say — no Scrum does not have the answer. What we create is again insecurity. Leadership is about creating security. Our answer should be — yes — Scrum is the answer — we know how to do it. And by the way: after five years doing Scrum we know how to do it. But we need to convey that the way of doing it is using principles of self-organization.
Response: Boris, I agree there is insecurity, but I don’t think we create it by our responses. It is there, and perhaps it is okay. It is the truth, at least. I don’t actually believe that “Scrum is the answer”, rather I think the response might be “you have the answer: Scrum will help you uncover it”.
April 13th, 2008 at 3:23 am
Excellent post, very powerful analogy!
/Henrik
June 30th, 2008 at 10:14 am
I’m realizing I’m way late on commenting here, but in defense of those of us who ask the question prematurely: at least for me, it’s looking for reassurance that it’s going to be worth my while learning Scrum, because if it doesn’t scale, I would need something else, something that does scale. But for now I’m happy to take your word for it
/Christina
July 10th, 2008 at 11:08 am
Interesting analogy. Re your quote ‘it benefits more from a one-foot-in-front-of the-other approach, embodying learning along the way.’ Are you also saying that organisational change needs to be one step at a time, one group at a time? If so , his does not seem to concur with the successful implementations of organisational change which centre around a sense of urgency and getting it done asap.
Response: Gerald, interesting question. In short I don’t know. Organizational change depends so much on the current culture, it is hard to make any generalizations. In a crisis a really great leader can rally an entire company around new ideas very quickly, but such leaders are rare. Sometimes change has to happen in a manner of “small leaps”, rather like evolution, which takes longer to effect a full transformation, but may be more appropriate for the culture. Pre-planning organizational change is likely to be as futile as second-guessing any complex system. You just have to do it, and figure it out on the way.
July 14th, 2008 at 9:55 am
Great analogy, Tobias. What prompted you to think of it?
June 7th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Thank you so much for posting this. I am researching this topic for a private matter and this is very helpful and informative.
January 11th, 2010 at 6:02 am
[...] Scrum the alcoholic perspective, Tobias Mayer [...]
February 6th, 2010 at 4:50 pm
I think what this is missing has been been touched upon by Christina. The person who asks that question is channeling her manager. The questioner may have utter faith in the ability of the scrum framework to arrive at a solution but she knows her organization will not make space for the framework to do its job without some sort of guarantee that it will succeed. It’s dandy to say that a self-organized team will empirically create a process that will enable a large project to be estimated but it would be a much easier sell if you could point to an example of how that worked elsewhere.
In my line of work we build and sell expensive instruments for analyical chemists that are driven by large software data systems (3-4 million lines of code). These systems have to control and optimize the instrument, store and analyze the data for 30 different applications, enforce security policies for provenance of the data, enable distributed data processing, and produce all manner of different printed reports. When my manager says to me “How long will it take us to move all of our existing functionality from the Mac to the PC and what will it cost?” all I can say to him is that I need to convene a scrum team of 7 people and we will self-organize into a team that will develop an empirical process which will iterate toward an estimate. While that may be the most honest answer, you’re not likely going to be asked to do the job. It would be far better to be able to say “This is the process by which one scrum team managed to deploy scrum across a group of 28 developers and delivered a product of similar magnitude in 3 years. If you’ll allow me to form a team, I’m sure we can empirically create a process process that will enable us to give you an estimate.”