Critical Mass?

As I have said previously, the mission has now moved to pushing Agile methods beyond software development and into the broader company. I had a meeting with my boss (head of Development) the other day and heard some surprising news. For the last 9 months or so an ever growing number of dev teams have been using Scrum. We were successful, but operating as a black box where the rest of the company ran around with their (half-completed/assed) functional specs, work requests, and piles of documents, had lots of status meetings, and generally flapped their arms a lot. Meanwhile we have been doing a fairly good job of shipping software and plugging it back in to their process.

It seems everyone in upper management has decided that it doesn't make lots of sense for us to have multiple processes in the organization. And it seems Scrum is the current front runner for being the standardized process. Overall this seems good and like the next big jump. We just have to get the right evangelizers in to secure the spot. Although that is a lot of pressure, and a much higher profile if it fails. I felt a little safer when this was coming in a a bottom-up thing.

Stay tuned.