The House of Scrum

The House of Scrum is a warm house. It’s a house where people are WELCOME. In the House of Scrum people from different backgrounds, in different roles, with different skills and talents work, learn and improve together, as a group, with no finger-pointing at each other or disrespectful work. The House of Scrum is an inclusive house of warm, open and collaborative relationships, not a house that excludes people.

The House of Scrum knows no versus. No business vs. IT, no team vs. organization, no Product Owner vs. Development Team, no development vs. support, or testers vs. developers (of code), our Team vs. your team, or Scrum Master vs. stakeholders. The House of Scrum is a great and energizing place where product development prospers from the combined, creative intelligence of people.

A similar house, just different materials, is the Lean house.
I created this (graphical) analogy when I was gathering, bundling, reviewing, editing and adapting some previously published blog notes to create some white paper-ish… papers. The first one covers this analogy: “The Blending Philosophies of Lean and Agile” (I will soon make it available via slideshare).

This is just partly about the result. I’m also going through it to check and improve my writing skills. Of course quite curious where it might lead me.

The paper, as I foresee it now, has 3 parts:

1. An introductory overview of the Lean Thinking and mindset as I laid it out in The Power of Lean Thinking,
2. Stressing the Agile Spirit (over jumping into singular practices) to demonstrate that Lean and Agile are indeed Blending philosophies,
3. The Scrum Perspective to Agile describes the main game playing rules of Scrum to demonstrate how Scrum implements the Agile principles and how Scrum is quite… Lean.

By the way, I am encountering the interest in this topic, Lean+Scrum, more and more. Organizations are looking to ‘Lean’ to help them revive. And I’ve already had several Lean coaches at my Scrum trainings and they share my enthusiasm for embedding a product development vision upon Scrum in Lean thinking. Let me hereby quickly summarize the compatibilities as follows:

Next papers I will be working on are:

• “Paving the path of Scrum adoption”, on challenges in challenging the status-quo state of many Scrum implementations;
• “The customer-oriented enterprise”, an answer to the major Scrum challenges from the perspective of the total organization.

Keep tuned!