ADP West 2010 - Dale Emery - Resistance as a Resource

In a previous column, George Schlitz proposed that process improvements, such as agile, require organizations to change process rules. Now George continues his review of agile in regards to compliance and auditing practices. What he's found is that changes to compliance and auditing rules may appear compatible, but the implementation process usually remains unchanged and conflicts with agile practices.

In today’s work environments, research proves that distributed Scrum teams can achieve the same quality results as co-located teams, but relationships, communication and culture play important roles in the latter.

About Scrum

Since its inception in 1993, Scrum has become a more and more popular software development framework among organizations. In fact, a Forrester research study, conducted in the fourth quarter of 2008 discovered that more than half of the 2,227 surveyed software organizations take advantage of some form of agile methodology. Additionally, of all the agile methods that are being utilized, Scrum is by far the most popular model.

How many times have you seen this scenario? Several years ago, someone created a spreadsheet to support the work of a department. They kept tweaking it, adding functionality; maybe even migrated it to Microsoft Access… and now it has become a mission-critical mess! And you can’t afford to let the employee move on to something else.