Gereon Hermkes: This is Behendigkeit Podcast number one with Sebastian Krempel and me, Gereon Hermkes. Good evening Krempel, good evening. „If you cannot scrum, you cannot scale.“ This is a quote from Dr. Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum and also the inventor of Scrum at Scale, and I think it’s very much true. The idea is that if you want to scale a Scrum implementation—which means moving beyond one team to multiple teams—you need a solution for the higher level of difficulty this presents. The reality is that a lot of people scale unwittingly. They hear of Scrum, implement it for one team, and even bad Scrum works well enough for them to get the bug and start adding more teams. They keep adding teams, but suddenly their total productivity starts to go down, even into negative territory. This is when they start looking for a scaling solution.

With Scrum at Scale, which I believe is the best scaling framework for Scrum (and full disclosure, I’m a Scrum at Scale trainer), a main point is to ensure the single teams are actually doing proper Scrum. They can’t be at a low level of Scrum maturity; they need to perform really good Scrum at the team level for the scaling to work. Otherwise, you’re just scaling your inability to deliver, or as I like to say, shit doesn’t scale. You have a bad Scrum implementation, you try to scale it, and you just blow everything up—it’s like that everywhere. If you have garbage in, you get garbage out. Scaling just magnifies all the little problems you have at the base level. So, in order to scale, you need to be able to scrum, and Dr. Sutherland is completely right about that.

But I wonder if there’s a corollary, the inversion: „If you can’t scale, you can’t scrum.“ Scrum has been around for a while, and now even large corporations are catching on that it works. It’s no longer just a small company with five or six people getting away with basic, team-level Scrum. For these companies to have an effect, it needs to be a scaled implementation. So my question is, if you just know basic, team-level Scrum, can you actually make it work or is it necessary from an early point on to know how to scale? This is counterintuitive, but has the game changed because of the kind of companies accepting Scrum? The first class should absolutely be on Scrum—Dr. Sutherland is right, you should become a good Scrum Master for one team before anything else, because otherwise you won’t scale. But do you now need to know which direction the scaling is going and what the changing requirements are for you, for example, as a Scrum Master, so you can actually do your job in a scaled environment? I think there’s a dichotomy here: both hold true. Yeah, if you can’t scrum, you can’t scale, but if you can’t scale, you can’t really scrum anymore. That’s a shift a lot of people haven’t realized yet. They’re doing basic Scrum, unwittingly scaling, and they’re running into really big problems; they actually need a scaling framework to do their job, otherwise they’ll just hit those problems. All right, any thoughts on „scale, you can scrum“?

Sebastian Krempel: No, not really, but I think most teams are scaling with not tight Scrum in the first place. They start with, I don’t know, whatever, and then they are messing up. Yes, bad Scrum is everywhere.

Gereon Hermkes: And what’s funny is that people are in such a rush to scale, and they think that’s a good thing. But before you scale, you should actually focus on the team, because if you have just fewer teams running much more efficiently, that’s much cheaper and much more efficient than starting to add teams. Even if you know how to add teams, the best way is to get the Scrum and the teams right first—that’s much more efficient.

Sebastian Krempel: Yeah, and I think there’s another problem: most of the time, there’s a coach or a Scrum Master who’s trained, but the rest of the team is not really trained. So they start to scale, or they start Scrum, with the trainer as a Scrum Master or something like this, and the rest of the team are just unknown people in a Scrum team.

Gereon Hermkes: Yes, absolutely. All right, good. So nothing changes until you do. But the good news is, you’re ready. Check, check.