Silicon Valley Professional Scrum
Advanced Scrum Case Studies

Meetup:

The Silicon Valley Professional Scrum Advanced Scrum Case Studies Meetup meets online.

Cases are published on this website 24-48 hours prior to the meeting.

To join the discussion, please use this Google Meetings link: meet.google.com/dfm-gbij-yar

Next Case: Everyone is too busy, October 19th, 7:00pm PDT and October 18th, 11:00am CET and 4:00pm ICT

You are an Agile Coach and you have been retained by a large organization that is in trouble. They have a major project underway with a budget of over $500 million. More than 24 months of work has been done but so far there is very little to show for it. You have been retained to find out why and to help things get “un stuck”.

The project is divided into several functional areas with a Director led organization in charge of each area. You select an area to concentrate on and seek out the Director. He greets you but says he is very busy. He asks you to make an appointment to meet with him. The earliest open time slot is a 30 minute window four days from now.

There are several Scrum Masters working in the functional area, but they all report to a Chief Scrum Master. The Chief Scrum Master instructs you to communicate to the Scrum Masters through him, and not to meet with them individually. He says they are too busy to make time to talk with you. He wants to relieve them from having to work with you so that they can concentrate on their own assignments.

There is a Product Owner team led by a Chief Product Owner. The Chief Product Owner manages the Product Backlog and assigns Product Backlog items to individual subordinate Product Owners whose job is to get their assigned Scrum Teams to implement them. Once again, the Chief Product Owner asks that you do not contact the individual Product Owners directly. She asks that you communicate with them through her.

You soon learn that the Chief Scrum Master and the Chief Product Owner are very busy in meetings all of the time. You can only book about 30 minutes per week to meet with either one of them. As a matter of fact, it turns out that almost everyone except the developers themselves are booked in meeting almost 95% of the time.

The developers, though, seem not to be very busy. After a few Sprints you find out that some development teams run out of refined and prioritized Product Backlog items to work on before the Sprint is finished. Many of them actually sit idle by the time Sprints are 75% over.

Your assignment:

1) Analyze the situation vis-a-vis the Scrum Framework

2) Identify the cause of the lack of progress.

3) formulate a plan to address the problems and outline the first few steps.