Get Involved

Summary

Some departments in your organisation will think Scrum has nothing to do with them and they don’t need to know about it, but agile practices effect all departments. Here’s how some departments might need persuading and what their cooperation could mean.

Get Involved

As we’ve previously stated, adopting agile practices needs to involve everyone in your company, even though some departments might not initially think so. Adopting Scrum is a company wide endeavour, but it often doesn’t feel like that for workers .Inevitably some departments will think this doesn’t have to involve them, but you need to persuade them that it does. Here are some departments you may need to work with when adopting Scrum, and the challenges you might face.

HR

The way in which your human resources team work could be directly apposed to the practices of Scrum, and this creates a clash of interests. Your HR team will try to rank your employees in order of productivity and performance, but this flies in the face of what agile practices are rying to achieve. Successful adoption of Scrum relies on strong teamwork, and HR’s review processes focusses on the individual, creating tensions with in a team and ignoring the benefits of teamwork.

Marketing

Your marketing team has an issue with dates. They need to schedule their marketing plans well in advance, sometimes a year, and this gives them a headache if development don’t adhere to these dates. Scrum can help with this and should allow marketing to be more flexible. Because Scrum teams adhere to dates strictly and progressively refine plans, a marketing team who is positive about being agile should see the benefits easily.

Finance

It’s important that a Scrum team meets with the finance team to talk over what changes will mean for them. Your finance team may be sceptical because they have experienced bad estimates from development before and they expect this to happen again. You need to be honest with them. It won’t be possibleto be 100% accurate, but you must restore theirconfidence in development by showing them you have an earlier detection practice in placeunder Scrum. This shouldalleviatetheirconcerns andacknowledgebad practices in the past.You may even delight your finance team with Scrum’s ability to track hours worked, thoughit’s worth pointing out that Scrum doesn’trequire a team to track hours, only if it’s useful andnecessary.

Above all is the push to work together. You canstart the ball rolling by making alldepartments aware that the current way of working is not producing the results it should be.Something has to change. Inevitably, you’ll begin with small teams enthusiastic about usingScrum and the majority of your organisation still sceptical. The shift will take time, but as thesuccess stories from your small team spread, it will happen. Any small successes are positive, but if this stays remote and exclusive to these teams only you jeopardise the whole transition. All departments need to see why they should be involved. The implications of adopting Scrum will directly effect other departments. Although they don’t have to use Scrum, they doneed to change how they interact with the departments that do use it. If they don’t they alsojeopardisethe success of Scrum in your company.