Selling Scrum

Brian M. Rabon, CST, PMP is the President of The Braintrust Consulting Group, a worldwide leader in agile transformations. Throughout his 17 years of IT industry experience, he has applied agile methods in order to successfully deliver working product to his customers.

  Scrum   ProjectsAtWork  

You know that using Scrum to manage projects can make a positive difference in your organization, but the executives you need to help drive the change are lukewarm or resistant to the idea. Here are some tips for getting them to buy into and support a Scrum implementation.

There is a saying in the Scrum community that goes something like this: “Learning Scrum is easy, but actually implementing it is difficult.”

As a Certified Scrum Trainer, I work every day with organizations that are attempting to implement Scrum. One of the biggest challenges they face is getting executive support. Implementing Scrum often requires driving organizational change. Without executive support, it is difficult, if not impossible, to change policy and procedure. As a result, Scrum implementations falter or fail outright.

So how do you go about gaining buy-in and executive support for Scrum?

I remember one of my first encounters with an executive. I was about 22 years old and so nervous that I was stiff as a board. The executive noticed and leaned over to me and said “remember we put our pants on one leg at a time, too.”

When you interact with executives, keep that in mind, and remember that they all want results but they aren’t all the same. Some executives may not care about the day-to-day details (the servant leader); others may be hands-on and want to be involved in every part …

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