The Amazing Team Race A Team Based Agile Adoption

In 2008, our organization successfully implemented an agile software development approach (Scrum) across the Application Development department after piloting Scrum in 2007 with a few projects. In just four months, our department consisting of over 200 contractors and 70 full time employees transitioned from a traditional waterfall-style approach (RUP) to Scrum. Less then 2 months later, we were running 40 development projects that were time boxed to three months. In the previous year, we had 20 active projects with duration of 9 to 18 months. After a year of introducing Agile, members of our organization were well aware of what Scrum was, but growing weary of training. There was a clear need to create excitement around the adoption and scaling of Scrum within the application development group. This led us to develop what we called ‘The Amazing Team Race.’ This experience report is about how an agile transition team used a team-based approach for creating excitement while scaling Scrum in a globally distributed organization.