To be able to scale Scrum, you have to strengthen your agile values in two places. The first place to boost agile is within your own company. This will not be easy. If you browse all of your departments, not just software engineering, but accounting, marketing and sales, operations, we would discover that your Chief Executive Officer, CIO and COO are off staying in a Waterfall world. That’s one factor Scrum jobs can’t scale and why you may feel you’re not getting much traction.
The second place to strengthen agile is in your interactions with external forces. By attempting to change what you are doing, the Federal Government is actively, however most likely un-knowingly, deteriorating your agile values. And if it’s a battle between the Federal Government and agile, we all understand who is going to win!
Both of these battles are winnable. Remembering that you are still relatively new to the company, you need to not expect triumph this year or even next. The concerns are simply too huge. However if you begin working on methods you can utilize to boost agile, you will certainly have the ability to construct a procedure integration layer to get your agile groups to speak with business leaders. This will certainly help you win the internal fight. And when you are winning the internal fights, you can persevere in the face of pressure from the client, and win some external fights too.
The CMMI is the perfect device to assist you do that.
Using CMMI as a framework (in contrast to slavishly abiding by practices) you’ll be in a position to work with the Waterfall state of mind of both your organization and your customer.
How does this take place? Consider:
Initially, the CMMI provides a framework for your agile groups to talk to business leaders, helping them understand how well agile approaches are working for THEM, and to interact essential details to other stakeholders like middle management, clients, and bookkeeping.
Second, the practices that CMMI provides to you include those that assist bring greater quality and strength to the Scrum ceremonies themselves (the “Certain Practices” in the CMMI), and those that assist enhance the understanding, adoption, and constant enhancement of the agile values and behaviors (the “Generic Practices” in the CMMI).
For these reasons, and numerous others, the means to make agile survive and flourish in the Federal Government is to make it more powerful. And the method to make agile more powerful is with CMMI.
