Scaling Scrum within an organization

Scrum is easily scaled throughout any organization just by following a few simple rules.

• Scrum teams can have no more than nine members.
• Each team has a single Product Backlog, prioritized by a single Product Owner.
• Every Scrum team is potentially made-up of Scrum Masters from lower teams, enabling Scrum to scale in any direction. This is how a “Scrum of Scrums” meeting is possible. It is also how Scrum potentially scales from the lowest levels of an organization to the highest.
• At every level, the Scrum Master drives change through removing obstacles. One of the primary ways to remove obstacles is to place them on the Product Backlog of the higher team. This allows process improvement to occur from the bottom up throughout a company, depending on how high an obstacle must travel before removal. Team retrospectives consider how to prevent removed obstacles from reoccurring.
• In order to maintain focus and visibility, team members accept only work defined by their team’s Product Backlog.
• No one should be working on anything that is not on a Product Backlog.

For more information, check out the article Bottom-up Continuous Process Improvement at the Controlled Chaos site.