Succeeding with Agile

What We’ve Been Doing No Longer Works

One final reason to consider changing to Scrum is if your current development process is no longer working. When a process that has worked in the past stops working, a common tendency is to do more of it. This was certainly the case at Yahoo!, where chief product officer Pete Deemer was one of the first to recognize the need for change.

Originally, Yahoo! tried Scrum purely out of desperation—the waterfall approach was clearly not working—and a year-long attempt to do the waterfall “better” through more thorough planning and analysis, more in-depth documents, more sign-offs, and so on was making things worse, not better. For the teams that saw benefits, which were most of the teams that tried Scrum, the ...