Adopting scrum in bangladesh

ADOPTING SCRUM IN BANGLADESHOpportunities, Challenges and Outcomes

M. Mizanur RahmanCEO, Informatix Technologies

CSM,CSPLeading Agile Bangladesh

community

Bangladesh Software Industry

Software and IT service industry in Bangladesh has crossed a long road over the last few decades.

It has matured and considered among the potential sector to contribute in our economy in coming years

The growth rate has increased significantly in last few years for IT friendly policies of government

Snapshot of the Industry - size

1000+ companies

US$ 400 million Revenue

70,000 + Professionals

Business Specialization of IT Companies

Appl

icat

ion

DevIT

ES

Ecom

mer

ce

Prod

uct d

evel

opm

ent

Mob

ile a

pps

Syst

em In

tegr

atio

n

othe

rs0

20

40

60

80

BASIS survey

BASIS survey

Company Sizes

# Of Employee

10-3030-5050-100100+

Mainly focused on outsourcing

# of companies

OutsourcingLocal Market

Project Management System Adopted by these companies

90% of the companies want to move to Agile

Water-fallAgileNothingRUP/XP

Opportunities

Help those companies who are interested, to move in Scrum

Guide the companies who are currently using Scrum in their organization

Educate people related to the industry about Scrum and adoption process in Bangladesh

Challenges

Based on the summary of these data, we can easily identify some challenges

Some of those are related to experience, knowledge, culture and practices

Some can be changed easily and some are not

Management Dilemma

Most of the companies owned by businessman who do not have formal knowledge about IT industry.

Do not believe in the concept self managing teams

Negligent about changes in the organization

Do not want to invest their time and money to understand and adopt something better.

Self Management – team members We love to get managed by others Self management = freedom unlimited Lack of understanding in commitment and

professionalism It is always good to have someone asking for

work update and control of the flow Not enough time for learning something related

project management Not motivated enough which leads to take them

the work as job , not as career Only motivation comes in form of benefits.

Proper Agile Knowledge

No formal education is provided on Agile in Bangladesh (university or professional organizations)

Mostly relies on online resources which leads to confusion or ambiguity

Not many full adoption of Scrum. Mostly partial adoption and modified ones

Not so many CSM, CSPO ScrumAlliance certified trainer visited

Bangladesh for the first time this year to conduct CSM course

Outsourcing – remote teams

Most of the clients from USA, Europe or countries with minimum difference of 4 hours

Improper split of the teams across different locations

Un-usual office hours to accommodate scrum rituals

Lack of qualified Scrum personals in all locations

There are lots of Scrumbut… We follow scrum but we do not have a

product owner. We follow scrum but we do not have

retrospective We follow scrum but we have hour long

daily meeting (not standup) We follow scrum but it is not time boxed We follow scrum but only the visual task

board

Baffled with early challenges Many companies stopped scrum after

first few sprints as things seemed uncontrollable to them

The chances of returning to scrum for those companies are very low

Time and cost for adaptation is a major concern

Missing scrum readiness throughout the organization

Mostly go with buzz word rather than actual research on organizational fitness.

Solutions

After working with different companies and the community in Bangladesh, we have adopted different solutions to address those problems

These solutions are specific to particular companies and might not work same way for others.

Solving Management Problem First focus on educating company

managements (CXO, Directors etc) about Scrum and how company can get benefitted by this

Give them an proper understanding of ROI in the long run by adopting Scrum

Help them get it running with a small pilot project and later adopt it to full organization.

Making everyone self managed Educate resources about motivation,

career and over all management practices

Take Scrum session at office on regular basis

Adopt Scrum fully in the organization and get help from expert where it is required.

Get rid of the habit of micromanagement and “I am your boss” culture

Make them part of the success and failure

Educating about Scrum

That’s where we are working for last few years We are providing free “Introduction to Scrum”

courses for company owners ,engineers ,managers and other resources.

8 hour long session focuses on the detail about scrum, working with remote teams and adopting scrum in Bangladesh

Provided training more than 300+ people in last 6 months

Managing first and largest agile group in Bangladesh in social media.

Starting Scrum from Top to bottom

Step 1 •Management (CEO, CTO, Directors, Investors etc) must have clear idea about scrum•Learn from Agile/Scrum professionals rather than own intuition

Step 2 •Start with a small team as pilot project•Train the team about scrum paradigm

Step 3 •Give team time to understand scrum and try to motivate them to be self managed. As a nation, we are not used to with self management properly. •Do not force them to start immediately

Step 4 •Run a test or small project for first time•Get help from experts during the first few iterations

Step 5 •Measure teams output with expected results•Try to find out where team is struggling and fix those

Step 6 •Keep patience during the whole transformation•It can take few weeks to few months for a team to adopt

Step 7 •Once the team outputs the expected result, try to repeat it for other teams•It can work as a base for others

Step 8 •Always plan, execute and adopt. Do not assume that team understood scrum properly and no need to invest time on study•Empower team members, give them opportunity to understand themselves

Step 9 •Keep a budget for whole transformation•You might not get an immediate result during the whole transformation process

Success stories