Research prior to asking this questions -> When to Use Waterfall, When to Use Scrum ?
I am not focus on pure waterfall vs pure scrum conversion. I am more incline of solving the following problems that are being caused by our very rigid waterfall implementation. As everything in big corporations, there is a little of fault in red tape and additional politics, but at heart of the problem is the Waterfall methodology that we currently follow.
Here are the symptoms:
- Business Requirements have very little quality since they hand-off these requirements at the beginning meeting a date for IT to start the software analysis. This frustrates the IT teams and use some of the development time to clear some of these bad requirements.
- Because Business requirements are not completed on time or have little quality, development usually develops the wrong thing, causing re-work.
- Because rework is necessary, and changes are unavoidable the QA team usually end up without the time to do proper work.
- In order to get anything in a release we have to estimate without requirements, this causes a list of things that the business wants but is unattainable because time to develop is inflated (mainly politics issue)
This department of 40-50 IT pros, have been trying to step out of waterfall into scrum for a year now, but is causing a lot of issues. Issues like (1) people using scrum to hide on the fact that requirements are not ready (2) other IT departments that don't use scrum complain about the process.
I have decided to try a 12 weeks scrum pilot. Shoot for a strict scrum implementation where that team will have a product owner that will be responsible for what is important. I think this will be the key of having a successful implementation. Right now the business is not accountable for their deliveries, and I think they should be. I will split these 12 weeks in 3 sprints of 3 weeks with 2 weeks of planning the pilot and 1 week of releasing to production.
The questions: In your experience - is there a MUST DO before I try this pilot with a very large organization?