The various problems which occur when a typical waterfall driven company starts to use agile project management methodology - in this case Scrum - are tough nuts to crack.

The workshop covers the Scrum process for newcomers very briefly and will then dive into the various problem areas which we had to handle (described below), what we did to solve some of the problems and also show open issues, where we propably didn't find a solution for (speaking of today). Interfaces to areas which are not scrum is one example, distributed teams and scaling scrum as well.

I will describe typical pitfalls and explain some of the major steps we took by using the John Kotter 8 step change model, which gives a good understanding of how such a change can take place and line those steps with examples out of the current project.

During a high profile, priority #1 project my customer decided to use Scrum instead of Prince2 as project management method in a datawarehouse project. The project had multiple streams, more than 70 project members and great dependencies towards business (energy trading). Most of the company is waterfall - so we had a lot of dependencies in areas which weren't agile at all. Secondly the 70 people where distributed across Europe - so how do you do Scrum when not everybody is colocated? How big can you have a scrum, when the interdependencies between the teams are too big to have them separated?

Various problems were arising during the transitions in different levels of the project. One is the reporting structure towards top / middle management, secondly the way Scrum deals with Scope and Timelines, third overwhelming barriers between the traditional "enemies" business and IT and more of that.

Dennis Hoofe

2001-2004 Diploma in Informatics & Economics
2004-2008 Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH - Project Management and EDI / SAP Development
2010-2011 Scrum Master for a large energy company in a DWH project