Amazon has long been using Scrum in its work practices. Since 1999, the company has been using agile practices for managing its employees. In the years between 2004 and 2009, Scrum became widely adopted in its development organisations. Amazon’s adoption strategy has been described as an unplanned and decentralised transformation that’s different from the way Scrum adoption usually takes place.
6 Ways Amazon Uses the Scrum Methodology:
Amazon’s teams were given broad discretion to solve their own problems without detailed prescriptive practices from a central authority. The decentralised decision-making discretion is designed to let teams create, deliver, and operate high-quality software in a streamlined and red-tape-free way.
Stable and long-lived teams support agile practices. Development teams have one manager to whom they report to directly. These standard Amazon team policies make the culture and work arrangement consistent with Scrum practices.
The spark was lit through team members who were happy to help educate others about Scrum on an ad hoc and voluntary basis. Once they were educated in the practices, individual teams were able to make ground-level decisions about how to implement it. The results these teams achieved drove other teams to become interested.
Amazon switched from dedicated servers to AWS and removed the siloed approach from its operations and development teams. This means their developers can deploy individual codes to any of their servers at their disposal, allowing the business to move and innovate faster. Engineers can scale up or down their capacity without restrictions.
Adopting Agile has allowed Amazon to deliver better software and save considerably on costs. An average of their 40% of dedicated-servers capacity ended up going to waste. Shifting to Agile practices have seen their engineers deploy a code every 12 seconds, accompanied by a drop in the volume and duration of outages.
With ad hoc, voluntary Scrum education; an email-based Scrum community; and occasional Scrum master training sessions, a critical mass of teams had adopted the winning practice. Following this, a Scrum trainer/coach position was created, and having a full-time trainer onboard meant easier adoption and high-quality agile working implementations.
Final Thoughts
Scrum implementation happened from the ground-level up at Amazon. No timelines or mandates were used. It didn’t start with management-level decisions and prescriptive plans for adoption.
By encouraging Scrum through fostering a culture of innovation and ensuring information about it is available, organisations can drive adoption by responding to demand and removing impediments as they’re discovered. Allowing stable, long-term teams to exist and giving teams plenty of discretion about how they would adopt went a long way to make this approach to agile working successful.
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