From time I meet people who say that their management introduced Scrum just because it is a hype. Honestly I doubt that. I have introduced Scrum and other agile approaches since 2000 into various companies and I have spoken to dozens (if not hundreds) of managers. And every manager was able to explain why he wanted Scrum/agile. Sometimes expectations were excessive but I have never met a manager who didn’t know why he wanted Scrum and just followed the hype blindly.
I think the misconception of the employees is caused by a communication fail. As George Bernard Shaw said:
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
The managers know why they want Scrum and normally they even have communicated it:
- once
- in an email
- hidden between a lot of other stuff
And that is just not enough to make a real change happen. Even if employees have read the message there is a lot of doubt:
- Does the manager really know what Scrum is?
- Would he really do what is necessary?
- Was the message just ad-hoc and now there is another most-important thing?
Therefore managers should
- communicate the intended change (together with the „why“) personally and face-2-face
- renew the message continuously
- model the wanted behavior themselves
Stefan Roock 
Kommentar verfassen