Going FAST - When Scrum is slowing you down
Author: Per Beining an Agile Consultant, joined a financial services company as a Scrum Master for two teams and transitioned into a Project Manager for the wider project.
Goal: Move a system from private to public cloud. Reimplementing features and configuration so it could run on a public cloud platform.
Progress: The project had been running for more than a year, and the Product Owner and wider team showed high levels of competence.
Problem: Nothing had been released to users and they were 6 weeks away from their first deadline. As such they looked to alternative methods to get back on track.
What should the organisation do?
They moved to the FAST Agile Framework after getting approval from the Product Owner and giving the wider group a terse introduction to the new framework.
Reorganised into a single collective, moved to short 2 day value cycles, empowered developers to own their work and enabled high levels of autonomy.
They met the deadline. The short value cycles enabled the project to pivot where needed and meet the operational needs of users while working on new features.
Their success saw a move in the wider area. They took a poll to see if people wanted to go back to Scrum, 9 out of 11 were in favour of FAST and 0 against.
Did what they do make sense? Would you recommend something different? How does this compare to other cases?
