How to convince Management (bottom-up)
Hello everyone,
I worked with the Scrum framework for more than four years in a startup that was shut down one year ago by the buyer company. After that, I found a position in a multinational company that, at least on paper and during our initial meetings, seemed to follow some of the Scrum events. However, I am now facing doubts about whether there can be a solution to our current organizational struggles.
When I joined, I discovered that the company is struggling to manage both new features and daily tasks. Team members are constantly called into meetings every day (both technical and organizational). The production infrastructure often fails, but we can only apply workarounds because the infrastructure team is abroad and unwilling to fix the issues (they ask us for workarounds since they don’t know how to resolve them). Departments are highly segregated (e.g., the DB team, in a +3.5h timezone, manages database configurations and backups; the same goes for the periodic penetration testing team).
IAM authorizations are not granted, according to the "Principle of Least Privilege", which prevents other team members from providing support. Many applications run on a very outdated tech stack that provides little to no learning value for developers. The headquarters—located in another country—demand remediations for the old tech stack, but at the same time, when our team requests additional employees to handle the workload, IT Managers refuse to hire more people.
For large projects, Managers often reassign the "most skilled" developers from various teams, allocating a percentage of their time to create a new project team. For example, they might say: “We have 1.5 people from Team X and 1.7 people from Team Y; now we need 3 more for Project Z.” This creates a situation where people are split between multiple teams without clear commitments to stakeholders (such as business analysts acting as Product Owners). Urgencies change daily, and context switching is very high. To make things more complex, half of the team consists of external consultants who usually stay for about three years and then leave for legal reasons.
This is the complete opposite of how our startup, in my previous experience, used to work. Is there anything I can do to support a Scrum culture here? I even started certificating myself here to be sure that I've embraced the culture. I’ve tried talking to my direct Managers (up to two levels above me) and to our Team Leader, but they all said that Scrum cannot be implemented due to organizational constraints—even though the company officially embraces the Agile Manifesto.
Thanks in advance.
A certain humility is needed if you are to try a bottom-up approach. It isn't your company to change: you don't own it. Instead you can learn to be good at wondering. Wonder about the things you see going on.
There are perhaps local optimizations that can be made, and which expose organizational constraints. They highlight the gap between where the company is now, and the agile principles they notionally aspire to. Be ready to extend a hand over the gap, and help people to cross if they want to.
So I guess that it's easier to change small to medium sized companies processes than big corps ones.
Yes, I wondered why this and that about many impediments, but they seem to be related to how the organization is structured: devs are not autonomous in their tasks (so for instance, if there's a SW architecture issue that clashes with the deadline requirement from executives, devs have to convince SW architects, a separate team, that they can't deliver in time... if the SW architects are not available, the meetings are postponed to weeks after the impediment arises, leading to further delays).
OK, I guess the company is not ready for a change, which is what I supposed during my onboarding phase. Thanks for your considerations :)
What if one cannot really convince anyone else about anything - unless that particular person changes his/her views?
Like - convince a religious person that gods are made up mumbo jumbo. Or convince an atheist that gods indeed are real-deal.
I need to agree with Ian here - maybe start small, identify and maybe do some ugh "local optimizations", but all in all look after yourself as ifthe setup is against you then possibly you'd need to once again play a CV-roulette soon.
In addition to what @Ian and @Maciej has said, you need to remember that the Scrum framework is not suitable for all organizations. And that an organization can be supported of the manifesto for agile software development without using the Scrum framework. There were many types of processes, frameworks, methodologies represented when the manifesto was written.
I agree that you might be better off starting small. Be an advocate for change and use your team as a testing ground for it. Get your leaders to allow you to be the trailblazer and try a few "new methods". If no one is allowed to do that, then the organization will never know if there is a better way. But be prepared for a lot of pushback and experiments that do not go the way you want. Since you are an advocate of the Scrum framework, I assume you are also an empiricist and take the opportunity to learn from each one.