Go Public Or Stay Stealth

Summary

Amongst the early decisions you need to make when adopting Scrum is whether to make a public display of your intentions or whether to operate in stealth mode. There’s pros and cons to both and which you choose depends on your situation.

Go Public Or Stay Stealth

Transitioning to Scrum is a process that’s full of possibilities and options. Your decisions will be made according to your situation, how quickly you want this to happen, and the attitude of your workers. One of the most major decisions you have to make right at the beginning is, do you go public with this transition or do you operate in stealth mode?

A public display of agility

Going public right off the bat has a lot of positives. Gong public could mean simply announcing the transition to the whole company, or it could me an announcing it to the public and media. But either way, by cementing what you are doing and letting everyone know, you are giving yourselves less room to fail. Think about it, if you announce to your family your intention to get fit, you are more likely to actually do it simply because you have made it public knowledge and failing now means you lose face. Doing this also gives you and your teams vision. It marks a goal to work towards, and you are all working towards it together. This also gives you a stronger sense of commitment to the project. It communicates to everyone that this is happening and there’s no going back. When you state to everyone publicly that you are transitioning to Scrum you are creating belief in them, you are saying ‘we are going to achieve this together’ and that sends a very powerful message.

Stealth movements

Depending on the situation in your company you may decide that as tealth approach is best. There are many pros to doing things this way, especially if you know you face strong resistance. If you make a big announcement to a large proportion of sceptic you are giving them the chance right away to down talk this, and this will give them momentum. Doing things quietly can also ease the pressure on teams to achieve results. If you transition instealth mode you can work with small teams to perfect the project and then reveal after that it was done differently. If the project fails first time you can learn from it and try again, all without the pressure of other teams being negative and picking apart what happened.

How you approach your transition is up to you and you’ll need to consider things carefully before you decide. Public displays often begin better because everyone is in on what’s happening and it projects confidence in the process. Remember, just because you go public doesn’t mean you have to go all in. You can still start off slow, and mostly you should, it’s just that everyone will know this is happening. But sometimes stealth can produce some unexpected results and can be great for spreading Scrum to other teams who are sceptical. They may hear a rumour that this is happening and when they see it’s going well, they’ll be more likely to want in on the action.