Depth of Penetration

The last nine months have been interesting for me. Upon reflecting, I was able to, without authority or mandate, convert a chaotic and stuck development group into a functioning Agile team, push adoption into other development groups, and witness those changes become entrenched in the organization. The success has been self-evident to the point where the head of dev now runs every project as a Scrum project - even the small 1-2 person projects.

I realized how entrenched Scrum has become when I was perusing the white boards after a cross-management strategy meeting. What I also realized is how boxed in it has become. It is no longer an insurgent movement spreading thru stealth and success. It is a known commodity. The down side is that people's view of this has been formed. And it is viewed solely as a development process. As much as this was initially and at it's heart a development process, it is also meant to scale across the entire organization - from product definition and business analysis to deployment and operations (well, perhaps not all the way to operations). Now that people have that opinion formed where Scrum fits only into dev, it will be more difficult to penetrate deeper into the organization.

I definitely need an outside proselytizer to teach and explain organizational Scrum. I also need a position where I can be heard by upper management across groups or a proxy mouthpiece to function in that capacity for me. Until then Scrum is stuck at the walls of dev with limited penetration into the test/QA group via a handful of sympathizers. Mostly because what they're currently doing is onerous, poorly functional, and doesn't deliver timely results.