Aligning codependent Scrum teams to enable fast business value delivery: A governance framework and set of intervention actions

Jan Vlietland*, Rini Van Solingen, Hans Van Vliet

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

29 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Many enterprises that adopt Agile/Scrum suffer from collaboration issues between Scrum teams that depend on one another to deliver end-to-end functionality. These dependencies delay delivery and as a result deteriorate the business value delivered in such value chains. The objective of our study is to support enterprises that suffer from such dependencies with a governance framework that helps them mitigate collaboration issues between sets of codependent Scrum teams. We first identify a set of intervention actions that aim to mitigate the collaboration issues between codependent Scrum teams. Second, we validate the effectiveness of these intervention actions in a large confirmatory industrial case study. This study was held in a large multi-national financial institute that worked with a large number of codependent Scrum teams. Third, we triangulate the findings in three focus groups. We finally package the intervention actions in a governance framework. The intervention actions led to a delivery time reduction from 29 days to 10 days. The participants in the focus groups confirmed the causality between the intervention actions and the observed delivery improvement. The empirical results show that the intervention actions, packaged in the governance framework, enable codependent sets of Scrum teams to deliver faster.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)418-429
Number of pages12
JournalJournal of Systems and Software
Volume113
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Mar 2016

Keywords

  • Agile
  • Alignment
  • Chain codependencies
  • Collaboration
  • Coordination

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