We are 7/8 person in the development team. I would like to convince my boss to use agile technics(SCRUM). He told me to present a bit of documentation, in order to evaluate it. He has an economy background but he is very open to "new tecnologies" and to experience. I can not present a big amount of documentation otherwise he will never read it. Can anyone suggest something?
3 Answers
Articulate how Scrum will improve the one thing most important to your boss
In addition to @zsolt's success stories, find out which one of the following is most important to your boss. It is easier to say they want all of them, but one of these may be more important than others based on your organization's current situation and their role in the organization. Try to articulate how Scrum will improve that specific item of interest to your boss:
Improve customer satisfaction: If your customer is frustrated with the painful change control process, this may be of interest. Also, they get to see a working product much sooner.
Minimize risk: By deploying a minimal application early and adding features to it every sprint or every few sprints, you get faster feedback and minimize risk of the project needing major rework.
Improve team morale and retention: Scrum improves team morale by channeling all prioritization through one person (the Product Owner), by encouraging self-organization (as against command-and-control) and by providing opportunities for team members to learn new skills (cross-functional).
Increase productivity: By reducing context switching, by removing impediments, by improving teamwork and by keeping team size manageable.
Improve quality of output: While Scrum does not require any specific engineering practices (such as TDD or continuous integration) by requiring a shippable increment at the end of each sprint it pushes you to adopt good engineering practices. Also, by making the team agree on a definition of done and by continuous improvements through retrospectives it improves the quality of output.
answered Oct 27, 2015 at 20:19
-
I'd also add shared work meaning there is less dependence on individual developers availability (or sticking around) to get certain tasks done. This one thing can be a big deal for a manager in my experience.– RobinCommented Oct 28, 2015 at 11:17
You can pitch success stories, and this collection might be a good start: https://www.scrumalliance.org/success-stories, or you can ask for a month to do it, and show him/her the benefits from your own experience.
-
A month sounds a bit short, going from an adhoc development cycle to a bit more structured Agile cycle might add overhead in the first few itterations. Commented Oct 28, 2015 at 13:08
-
I kind of agree, however, it is very rare that a manager let teams to try out something for more than a month without any prospective results.– ZsoltCommented Oct 28, 2015 at 13:36
Ask your boss if he is willing to read a book about the subject. I think this is the best way to get most of the needed information and a better understanding of the concepts then some slides and summaries will give. I believe any manager should continuously read books about their respective industries processes and tooling.
The newest book of Jeff Sutherland "Scrum The Art of Doing Twice The Work In Half the Time" reads like a novel and anyone should be able to finish it in a couple of evenings.
If your boss is more skeptical, maybe the book "This is Agile" of Sander Hoogendoorn might be a nice alternative. Sander writes about his Agile experiences and it does not focus on a single framework like Scrum. His years of experience are a nice and complete read from general Agile concepts to implementation.
Pushing Agile bottoms up is a start, but for it to work I think you also need to push top-down. The whole organization needs to understand why you want to be Agile and should support this, else it will be a hard ride.
answered Oct 28, 2015 at 13:06
