Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Closing the water taps

Waterfall...or is it "Waterfail"?

Since the first time I've been in contact with a project, there has always been one single common factor for each of them:

Failure
(bigger or smaller, but always failure)


I'm not going to describe what waterfall is about, or why it does not work when applied to software development. I will, nonetheless, tell you how hard it is to remove the waterfall approach from some "experienced people" when it has been in their lives for so long.

First, how waterfall was removed from my own brain: I already saw some other scrum initiatives within the company, they consisted mainly of contacting companies working in fixed price and applying what they called "Scrum", which was only scrum as they used post-its ....

These companies were actually still using the "waterfall" approach to develop the product, and they were creating and moving post-its as and when they felt there was a need to do so.

Unfortunately, this gave the wrong idea of what scrum was about, and it even looked like a joke, I must admit that even I thought that scrum was completely useless and had no point.

Later on, a fellow country man of mine came to the company as an agile coach (Xavier Quesada) being of same countries and speaking the same language we naturally got together very well.


He showed me then what scrum was about and got me hooked ever since! It took him just a couple of hours to make me see the light.

Our complete team was going to take the lead into the scrum initiative, we would have 3 Scrum masters, with one team each.


As I became interested in the subject, and because of this major reorganization, I was given the opportunity to be a Scrum master for a team of around 10 people.

Then, the hardest work, to change mindsets, started.

The main question was, why?, why should we use Scrum if we have been using waterfall for years and everything seemed just fine?. The answer was "Why Not?". There is no track of a single project that was delivered on time and within scope, they could say that we were using this waterfall approach for years, but nobody could give just one single example of a properly delivered project.

In simple terms, the waterfall approach seemed to be working, but it wasn't. This was the opportunity we needed to introduce scrum, of course, with a big risk of having to hear "I hate to say I told you so" if Scrum failed to provide what it promised.

And the journey into scrum began ...

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