Scrum Skeptics: How to Address Leadership’s Most Common Concerns

Alex Brown

July 21, 2014

Scrum Inc. COO Alex Brown explains how to address one of the most common knee-jerk reactions from senior management when it comes to implementing Scrum: “We can’t do that here.”

If you’ve ever tried to convince a skeptical senior executive to give Scrum a shot then you’ve likely experienced a fair amount of pain and frustration. In worst-case scenarios, it can feel as though you’re repeatedly banging your head against the wall.
Unfortunately, anti-Scrum bias can exist, and it’s often the byproduct of poor understanding or misinformation. Typically, it boils down to one of two concerns: Either the company’s product is too complicated to fit into a short Scrum sprint, or the business lacks the manpower to perform all the testing that needs to be completed in a sprint.
The good news? Both objections are fallacies. And Scrum Inc. COO Alex Brown shares a couple of simple tips for overcoming them in the video below.

How to Address Management’s Common Scrum Concerns


 

Key Takeaways

1) It actually takes longer to test after a sprint than during one

It’s not unusual for one of the core concepts of Scrum — that sprints should conclude every 1-4 weeks with a fully “shippable” product iteration — to be met with scrutiny. After all, that means testing included, and for some companies accomplishing both that and development in a month or less might not seem possible. In fact, it might not be possible — at least not by doing things the way they’ve always been done. For many companies, this is where they run smack into the ultimate challenge of Scrum — it’s about doing things differently, and that often involves changing not only processes, but mindsets, as well.
Luckily, staring at cold-hard data can help. According to Brown, it takes somewhere between 12 and 24-times longer to conduct product tests outside of product sprints. The reason: The tester has to flashback to their mindset when they wrote the original code and sift through countless lines of new code to find the root cause of a bug. By conducting testing within the sprint, teams can far more efficient, and release much faster.

2) Overcome objections by offering to try Scrum as an experiment

Don’t frame Scrum as a locked-in-stone commitment. Instead, offer to try it for a period of time and measure whether output goes up or down. Typically, Brown says the results make it hard for management to ignore the value of Scrum.

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Image courtesy of Lisa Brewster

Partner

<strong>Alex Brown</strong> is a partner at <a href="http://reconstrategy.com/">Recon Strategy</a>. Prior to this role, he was the Chief Operating Officer of Scrum Inc., a firm specializing in agile strategy and rapid new product innovation. Before that Alex spent 6 years at BCG, where he was a leader in the healthcare and consumer strategy practice areas. His engagements included re-envisioning high performance network design for a major national PBM; and designing a "nudge unit" leveraging consumer psychology to improve patient outcomes for a leading retail pharmacy. Prior to BCG, Alex led demand forecasting of complex transportation networks for major public investments. Alex graduated from Cornell University with a B.S. and Masters in Engineering, and earned an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.