The difference between Desire and Belief

In trying to bring our second team online with Scrum, I've hit an unexpected road block. In retrospect it should have been expected, but 20/20 hindsight, etc. Previously I'd mentioned how it was refreshing at Agile 2006 that there were so many pragmatic people and fewer "true believers" than I would have thought. That's a good thing for the state of the art, but not necessarily good for a day to day rollout.

On the other team is a peer team lead that also desires to move to Scrum. He was one of my early allies in getting the first team online and making sure the effort wasn't squashed from above. Now, trying to bring his team over to Scrum, I've realized that he doesn't fully believe. Let me say that again. He desires to move his team to an agile development model, but he doesn't yet believe it is the best way to deliver the product. Without that belief in success, the desire simply sits there, unfulfilled.

We did do the first release planning and initial backlog prioritization, but they (as a development team) have as yet been unwilling to take the time to plan their first sprint (iteration). At best, the devs see this as a new organizational idiosyncraticy to be tolerated, at worst they don't buy in and view it as a top-down edict that will hamper their work. Ironic, given that it started on our team as a bottom-up effort. They're also forgetting what an unmitigated disaster their last product release was - months late, feature poor, and of such crummy quality that an additional four month on-site development effort was needed to stabilize the product. The former head of product development was fired, we almost lost our largest customer, a multi-million dollar contract, and at best the product simply limps along.

Which brings me back to an earlier post - Alway Be Selling. And sell the rank and file before you bother with the top.