Coordinating multiple Scrum Teams
Jeff Sutherland notes that the original Scrum Guide worked very well at defining how a single Scrum Team works collaboratively to achieve optimal outcomes, capabilities, and sustainability. Over time, the success of Scrum led organizations to scale Scrum to increasingly larger product development efforts that required the expansion and coordination of multiple Scrum Teams. Scrum proved scalable in these larger product development efforts. Nevertheless, Jeff also concedes that new extensions to Scrum were necessary to overcome two major issues that arose when scaling Scrum across multiple teams:
- Declining Scrum Team efficiencies
- Unclear management structures at scale
The Scrum Team inefficiencies came from the same network density and non-value-added waste issues you learned about in the previous chapters on Chapter 4, Systems Thinking, and Chapter 5, Lean Thinking. The most critical issues associated with scaling Scrum are the exponentially...