{"id":1,"date":"2010-06-18T20:51:35","date_gmt":"2010-06-18T18:51:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leanmagazine.net\/wordpress\/?p=1"},"modified":"2024-03-15T15:18:50","modified_gmt":"2024-03-15T14:18:50","slug":"scrum-large-projects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/leanmagazine.net\/scrum\/scrum-large-projects\/","title":{"rendered":"Scrum for the Big ones"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jeff
Jeff Sutherland<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

During his long career, Jeff Sutherland \u2013 often referred to as the inventor of Scrum \u2013 has participated in many projects where Scrum has been implemented in larger organizations. In this article, he shares his experiences in an industry where offshore outsourcing is a major trend.<\/em><\/p>\n

When did you first try Scrum for larger projects?<\/strong>
\nIn 1996 I was hired by IDX-systems as their VP of product development, and eventually their CTO. I started at that company with about 300 developers, and by year 2000 we had almost 600.
\nSo we started immediately by convertingthe 300 developers that were in the company \u2013 all of them \u2013 to Scrum in 1996.<\/p>\n

And how were the Scrum teams organized in this company?<\/strong>
\nIDX had several business units with different product sets, and all the products had to work together in large enterprises. The larger product units had about 100\u2013150 developers, and the smaller ones were 30\u201360 developers.
\nOne of the interesting things I am finding in companies now is that about 60 developers tend to be a product unit. If the product is bigger it can typically be broken down into pieces that work well, with about 30\u201360 developers in each development team.\u00a0And that can be very nicely broken down into a set of Scrums that is run by a Scrum of Scrums which consists typically of the leaders of every\u00a0Scrum team.<\/p>\n

So, according to your experience, how many Scrums would there typically be in a product unit with 60 developers?
\n<\/strong>If you divide that by seven you get a little bit less than nine, so it would probably be seven or eight Scrums.<\/p>\n

When starting with these larger projects with Scrums of several and\u00a0more Scrums \u2013 which were your greatest challenges?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We really did not have any significant problem in extending it into multiple\u00a0teams. The problems we had were the typical problems when starting up a single Scrum \u2013 making people understand how it works and following the process. Having the daily meetings and get the reports out, so the whole\u00a0team could see the state of the project every day.In retrospect at IDX we had very detailed data provided by external\u00a0consultants on the productivity of every\u00a0team.<\/p>\n

I engaged Capers Jones, who is\u00a0one of the leading productivity analysts\u00a0in the United States. I had his\u00a0company come in and do a function\u00a0point analysis of every release for all\u00a0products. So we knew how many\u00a0function points were added incrementally\u00a0by every team. So we got\u00a0a clear velocity that was completely\u00a0independent of any team, and\u00a0was comparable across teams. IDX\u00a0on the average increased their productivity\u00a0with a factor of about 2.4\u00a0using Scrum \u2013 that is 240 percent.\u00a0But Scrum was designed to produce\u00a0teams that get five to ten times\u00a0of industry average. I was always\u00a0interested in finding a few teams\u00a0\u2013 which we did have \u2013 that hit that\u00a0hyperproductive state. And I was\u00a0always trying to figure out why the\u00a0Scrums that only doubled productivity\u00a0\u2013 why they couldn\u2019t do more.\u00a0At IDX in retrospect, I had a lot of\u00a0difficulty getting them to break the\u00a0teams down small enough. They had\u00a0a culture that historically had had\u00a0thirty person teams \u2013 and I managed\u00a0to get these teams down to fifteen\u00a0or less, but I could not get them all\u00a0consistently down to seven. Industry\u00a0data show that seven people can\u00a0finish the same project earlier than\u00a0eleven people \u2013 so that I think significantly\u00a0impacted productivity.\u00a0You know, the goal of Scrum is to\u00a0achieve Toyota-level performance,\u00a0that is four times the level of your\u00a0competitors in terms of throughput,\u00a0and twelve times the quality. And\u00a0the fact that we only doubled the\u00a0productivity and could not get four\u00a0times I believe was directly related\u00a0to the team size.<\/p>\n

So, one of the problems when implementing\u00a0Scrum in larger organizations\u00a0is obviously that it is hard to get the\u00a0size of the teams small enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During his long career, Jeff Sutherland \u2013 often referred to as the inventor of Scrum \u2013 has participated in many projects where Scrum has been implementedin larger organizations. In this article, he shares his experiences in an industry where offshore outsourcing is a major trend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":186,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,83,4],"tags":[6,21],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/leanmagazine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/leanmagazine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/leanmagazine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leanmagazine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leanmagazine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"http:\/\/leanmagazine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1044,"href":"http:\/\/leanmagazine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/1044"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leanmagazine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/leanmagazine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leanmagazine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leanmagazine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}