Challenges in scaling scrum

Date and Time: 
2013 Wednesday, April 3
Location: 
CG1 Auditoriums
Speaker: 
Robert Ward

Scrum is most often explained as it applies to a team or as a set of principles that can guide decisions about tradeoffs (the agile manifesto). There is little guidance on how scrum should look and work from the perspective of the enclosing organization(s) -- especially when there are many teams, many projects, many cultures and difficult customers with many escalations that must be addressed "NOW"!

An alternate view of scrum is that it is a re-rationalization of management ideas which aims to replace inappropriate concepts developed to optimize manufacturing operations with concepts better suited to product development. When trying to choose the right organizational adjustments to support scrum in scaled, complex environments, interpreting scrum principles as an intersection of lean manufacturing, SPC, decision theory, organizational behavior, and queuing theory, creates a more precise context for finding useful insights.

This presentation will share some experiences in scaling scrum, point out some specific practices or views that don't scale well, and identify some common problems in scaled scrum.

Speaker Description: 

Robert Ward is a director of engineering who, during the last few years, has led the conversion to scrum within a division of Motorola. This division now has around 40 scrum teams operating in locations on four continents.

During a prior life he founded R&D Publications, Inc., a technical publishing firm best known for the C/C++ Users Journal.

He holds an MSCS from the University of Kansas.

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