I am very very happy to report that our Summer School is being received very well. The Blog feedback you have given us shows us how important it is to show the reasons behind Scrum. To show that real change is a lot of work. Today is a day for Case Study, like every Wednesday in the next 8 weeks. So: How has Scrum been successfully implemented by a company?
Steve Green of Salesforce.com explained at a Scrum Gathering in Stockholm in 2009 that they did not just do a little Scrum, but started out using the complete process. They had the choice at that time to intensify their project management practices or to go a completely different way. They decided to go an entirely different way, which is described very well here:
What is not shown in the presentation is a conversation, that I had last week with Jodok Batlogg, former CTO of StudiVZ, Berlin. He had met with Steve Green as a result of my recommendation and found out what Salesforce.com really looks like. According to him Salesforce implemented Scrum to an even greater extent after 2008. Consequently Salesforce has created teams each with 5 people, each of these 5 person teams has a Product Owner. 5 Product Owners form a PO-Team and 5 of these Teams together form their own Business Unit. Salesforce consists of 4 of these Business Units. I think it is exciting how consistent they are. They now use company wide Scrum and have integrated Scrum into all branches of their business.
They reworked the aspects, which occurred to them during Scrum implementation. This is easy to see in the above presentation: after the initial implementation of Scrum they stopped once they realized that they were working too quickly. Finally they concentrated systematically on the various aspects of software development and slowly but surely brought everything back in order.
One result that is evident from the above presentation, is that Salesforce.com succeeded slowly but surely to process their technical debt. I don’t know if they have finished this process, but that is not important. What is important is that every day they take a step in the right direction.
One of our customers tries to process his technical debt by reserving 30% of every Sprint for new architecture and refactoring. No, they don’t do that, because they think it is great but because they know that they must make these investments today, if they want to keep their products alive.
Tomorrow we will give you more complete information on this site about the topic of “Why is Scrum so important?“