How to start Scrum with more than 100 people

Adopting an agile mindset and beginning with Scrum can be scary and daunting. Getting started with Scrum brings many challenges and concerns. It might even be completely new to the organization. The traditional structure might be removed or reconsidered, management is worried about what their part is going to be as accountabilities move to the Scrum Teams, and team structure is set to be cross-functional.

Now imagine that you’re working in an organization with 100 people, and they want to get that started with Scrum. That’s great! Now what? Where do you start? How do you avoid falling into mechanical/zombie Scrum pitfalls? Let’s start at the beginning.

Common personal reasons for reluctance to change I have experienced include:
- Job insecurity
- Fear of losing status
- Fear of lacking information
- Fear of losing control
- General confusion

As Simon Sinek already stated in his book Start with Why, actually start with why. Why are we changing? What is the risk if we don’t? Make people understand the burning platform. I’ve been part of an agile transition at a company that basically did not have a burning platform. They literally owned 85% of the market. They did not clearly get the Why ingrained into people’s minds. It resulted in a whole lot of confusion, a very shallow transition that is still going on, even after 6 years of effort. Don’t get me wrong, agile has no end-state, but after 6 years a lot of change can happen. In this (and many more) case it didn’t really happen.

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