How do you improve the waterfall with Scrum or Agile?

Many Project Managers come to my courses to find out whether Scrum and Agile are something for them and their for organizations. Sometimes the answer regarding Scrum is ‘No.’ What then? What can you do with the lessons of Scrum to improve your productivity if you’re constrained to phase driven development? This is where the values of the Agile Manifesto can be really helpful!

Yvonne Horst, a Project Leader for Swisscom and recent CSM, just sent me a nice example (she also sent a nice recommendation for my course, but I digress):

“I would like to point out one idea. The usual staffing approach for projects in a non-Scrum environment is to send specialists into a project and have them produce the artifacts of the respective phase. At the end of the phase the artifacts are handed over to the next group of specialists, which makes it sometimes extremely difficult to ensure the know-how transfer over the whole lifespan of the project.

“The idea of the Scrum team with all necessary skills on board to solve whatever problem that may occur can be transferred into a waterfall team as well – if only by booking one or two key resources over the whole lifespan of the project.

“I want to go one step further now and am currently building a team of requirements engineering specialists, each and every one of them with in depth know-how of at least one core system. They will no longer be sent to projects, but the projects may in future obtain results from this team for their specific problem/changes/challenges/high level requirements with reference to the represented core systems. The team works and acts together.

“The first feedback from the business units as well as the Project Managers has been enthusiastic. And the team members tell me that they have learned more from their colleagues in the last two weeks than in the two years before…”

Here we have an example of applying both a Scrum practice and the Agile value, “People and Interactions”. You can apply the Manifesto for Agile Software Development to any context. You do not have to do Scrum or XP to be Agile! Just value the “stuff on the left” more in your decision making:

• Individuals and interactions
• Working software
• Customer collaboration
• Responding to change

What are you already doing that values Individuals and Interactions or Working Software? What could you do more of (or less of) to emphasize these values? What could you start doing?

And Scrum itself can provide the inspiration for possible improvements. How could you apply timeboxing? How could you inspect and adapt more frequently on the basis of honest information?

I am sure there are other examples of applying Agile Values and Scrum Practices to traditional project management. I’d love to hear your suggestions and examples!