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A final quote from Jeff Sutherlands presentation: Agile and Scrum Tuning I wrote about recently.

The question is if there is anything else that can bring an organization to the same level of performance as Scrum.

Right now I’m working with a CMM level 5 organisation. It took them seven years to get to level 5. Everybody is using the same process. All processes are monitored. They got so much data that I can ask them any question, and the will give me 3 answers from 3 different datasets.

The thing about CMMI maternity levels is it’s designed to reduce rework. CMMI level 1 companies have about 50% of rework. That’s bugs and stuff that has to be redone because it’s not right.

By the time you get to CMMI level 5 you have only 10% or less rework. You added about 10% of overhead for process management. You haven’t increased the productivity of the real work.

So, they spent 7 years to eliminate — to bring their rework from 50% to 10%. It improved their productivity by about 25%.

They then introduced Scrum. They immediately cut their defect rate by 40% (they were already very low). They cut their planning overhead by 80%. They doubled their productivity.

And now they are bidding contracts out to the Defence Dept. in the US, for example. If they want waterfall it cost them 10 million, if they want Scrum it cost them 5 million.

And they have only been doing it 6 months. I think they can go all the way like Toyota and get it twice as much. So what I can say is I have real data that shows that Scrum can take the most mature company in the world and fix it. And I haven’t seen anybody else that has that kind of data.

I think that Scrum is like Toyota. Toyota has this team that go all over the world helping companies be better.

They did this experiment couple of years ago. They said let’s find the most agile company in the United States. And they found this industrial process control company that won all kinds of agile awards.
They sent the Toyota team in there. In six months, they doubled everything.

Just like the Scrum example. They did everything I just described in the CMMI 5 example.

So my point is that there is no company that Toyota can’t fix. I don’t care how good it is. And fixing it means they will double every metric in a positive way.

And I think Scrum can do the same thing. It is based on the same concepts as lean manufacturing is.

Bonus quote from a video presentation by Craig Larman

[The managers of a big defense industry company] explained to me that they were proud to be a CMM level 5 company. Wow. And they spend a couple of hours explaining to me how it all worked. There were at least 40 managers there explaining how it all worked. An also in the room were a bunch of developers. And when the managers left, first thing they said was

“Don’t believe a word they say. There is absolutely no way we can run a successful CMM5 software project if we follow these crazy CMM practices. We fake it and then fill in the paperwork afterwards and then try not to let the managers know”

This is of course another echo the “nail” story in 5-year economy

In stead of focus on results and innovation and there is a focus on conformance and process.

(from Valtech http://www.valtech-tv.com/permalink/2284/scaling-lean-thinking-and-agile-methods-to-offshore-development-part-i.aspx — note: Free but requires registration!)

Related post:
Internal Capgemini Scrum Presentation

Technorati Tags: agile, scrum, cmm, cmmi, project management, video, presentation, toyota

This entry was posted by Jesper Rønn-Jensen on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 20:17 (GMT-1) and is filed under Agile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.