Management’s Role in Scrum

Alex Brown

November 22, 2012

If Scrum teams at your organization are operating in guerrilla fashion without proper buy-in and support from above it’s safe to say they’re not operating optimally.

“We’re to the point in the development of Scrum where a lot of Scrum teams are executing Scrum very well,” says Scrum Inc. COO Alex Brown in this short video. “What seems to be the single biggest impediment for a lot of them at this point is that the leadership that they’re working for doesn’t understand Scrum, doesn’t understand how Scrum team works, and is very often asking team to report upwards in a traditional waterfall way, which actually is pretty incompatible with the way an efficient Scrum team works.”

In response, Brown and his colleagues at Scrum, Inc. have developed a leadership workshop, specifically aimed at informing senior executives what to expect from a high-functioning Scrum team, and also the commitment they need to make, themselves, in order to best assist the team and remove possible impediments.

To learn more, watch the full video and visit ScrumInc.com.


Partner

<strong>Alex Brown</strong> is a partner at <a href="http://reconstrategy.com/">Recon Strategy</a>. Prior to this role, he was the Chief Operating Officer of Scrum Inc., a firm specializing in agile strategy and rapid new product innovation. Before that Alex spent 6 years at BCG, where he was a leader in the healthcare and consumer strategy practice areas. His engagements included re-envisioning high performance network design for a major national PBM; and designing a "nudge unit" leveraging consumer psychology to improve patient outcomes for a leading retail pharmacy. Prior to BCG, Alex led demand forecasting of complex transportation networks for major public investments. Alex graduated from Cornell University with a B.S. and Masters in Engineering, and earned an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.