7 things to check before you decide to Scale Scrum
Perhaps you don’t need to scale at all!
The world is flooded with approaches to scale Scrum. Popular frameworks are SAFe, Nexus, LeSS, Scrum@Scale. While all of these approaches may have their merits, it breaks my heart when people scale without considering a couple of critical topics. Here are 7 things to check before you decide to scale Scrum.
1. Does your product have one Product Backlog?
Often teams have their own Product Backlog. Even if multiple teams work on the same product. This is not effective. It limits the options to align teams, have an overview of what is to be done next and how items can relate to each other. This is why the Scrum Guide says the following:
“Multiple Scrum Teams often work together on the same product. One Product Backlog is used to describe the upcoming work on the product. A Product Backlog attribute that groups items may then be employed.” — Scrum Guide 2017
Below you see an example how to do this, borrowed from Sjoerd Nijland, that uses colouring to group items. This allows teams to select items, based on the colour.
