Scrum not scaling for you? Here's why...

Last week, I recounted the six cornerstones that have to be in place before Scrum—or any process—can be completely successful for a team.

Over the weekend, I thought about these are realized that the same can be applied to anyone needing to scale Scrum.

To apply them, you need only replace team players with full teams and team perspective with that of the organization.

Let's try it.

To successfully scale Scrum, the following must be established:

• Clear, realistic organization goals must be defined in a clear priority order and updated on a known schedule within parameters understood by all teams.
• Dependencies between teams must be defined to achieve organization goals, ensuring a sharing of commitments between teams.
• Transparency of process must exist throughout the organization, allowing each team to see what every other team is doing and knowing when they are moving closer or farther from the organization's goals.
• Company culture must enable teams and team players to admit they need help and to accept help without any feelings of failure or expectation of retribution.
• Within the set parameters of the business domain, the team members—not management—must be allowed to identify and solve their problems themselves.
• Management must support removal of all obstacles to achieving goals, or management must allow the teams to remove the goals.

As with individual teams, these fundamentals allow organizations to grow and endure all hurdles.

Now, you try it, and let me know what happens.