On Continuous Improvement And Agile Transformations

In today's episode, we make the connection between the Scrum Framework and continuous improvement. Few Scrum Teams start from a position where everything works smoothly. Often, you initially don't know very well who your stakeholders are, you don't have access to them or you can't release as frequently as you'd want to. So there's a lot to improve and to learn. And if that doesn't happen, you're bound to get stuck in deep Zombie Scrum.

At the same time we see many organizations engage in "Agile Transitions" that promise to change from one state (e.g. waterfall-based development) to another (e.g. Agile) in a short amount of time. But an exploration of organizations that have undergone such transitions shows that stakeholders are still not involved, releases still happen very infrequently and little value is delivered to stakeholders.

So we draw from two helpful perspectives - organizational learning by Chris Argyris and the force field model by Kurt Lewin - to understand how continuous improvement is vitally important to effective Scrum - and change in general - and unlikely to be rushed on by "Agile Transitions" and "mindset changes".

We apologize for the sound quality here and there. The gain of our microphone was a bit too high, which means that there are a few cracks here and there. The good news is that we've learned to reduce the gain now for the next recording :)