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Writer's picturea1amogh

Liberating Structure for Successful Transformation in Scrum

Updated: Apr 13

“Unity is strength, when there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved.”- Mattie Stepanek




Scrum is a huge and widely used framework in various types of organizations. Every organization wants to have the benefits scrum provides and mark their enterprises on the top. There are various articles, books, personnel trainers, certified scrum masters from official scrum institutes, and much more. But while implementing scrum and using scrum in organizations makes it a popular choice for organizations, every organization follows its promise of faster delivery and increasing agility by using scrum as its framework. But many organizations that are following scrum are only at the surface of it without their knowledge and still haven’t had a peek at its inside. Our community must guide them in getting out.

Even though implementing artifacts, events, roles, having certificates, and all are necessary but all this is useless without providing the end delivery of working and valuable software to the customer. The involvement of customers and users with a drive to improve is what is required in the implementation of any role.


When the organization implements roles, artifacts, and events, and launches scrum teams to implement agile and scrum, they take almost a year or two of their important time considering that the implementation work is done but forgot to consider a bigger picture while local optimization. There is where the issues start as everyone considers they are manipulated and controlled increasing the delivery time, and worsening the employee commitment which is opposite of scrum’s provided advantages. This is all because the organization loses to include the essence of scrum in their transformation and only went with practical implementations. What are the main causes of reaching such worst situations after implementing scrum let’s discuss and also see their solutions?


Causes
  • Skipping the harder parts considering them unwanted. Many organization skips sprint goals, role, and artifacts as they are harder to implement so organization uses the easy way of skipping them.

  • Even after implementing or transforming to scrum the contract is kept constrained by a fixed budget, planning, and scope. This makes implementation of scrum almost too useless.

  • Scrum teams are forced or asked to use digital tools with mandatory fields not allowing using of physical boards to include transparency in their teams.

  • By including many complementary practices like velocity, story points, and user stories organizations make scrum a heavyweight framework.

  • Most times scaling is implemented throughout the organization without understanding its intention and requirements or even they are not able to implement it in a single team successfully.

  • One of the main reasons to fail in transforming into a scrum is because organizations are not aware of why they want to transform into a scrum. The reasons they provide are baseless like as someone important individual said it should be implemented because it ensures 100% productivity or even because all our competitors are using it.


One of the most effective solutions to this worst scenario while implementing the scrum is using a liberal structure.

The liberating structure is an important tool that ensures that deepens the team member's and individuals' interaction with the team. It is the group interaction pattern that helps the team to deepen, enrich and unflatten collaboration in groups. In general, the meetings, discussions, brainstorming sessions, and presentations are dominated by only a few people with loud voices and the silent participants are just there to attend it losing their creative ideas and different perspectives.

In most cases, we see that the failures occur not because of bad people, or incompetent and stupid leaders but it is mostly because people who learned the practices are not applying them to reality.




The easiest and most effective solution which capably fits scrum is of liberating structure. The liberating structure opens a wide variety of applications, of collaboration, problem-solving, determining combined strategies, and creating shared understandings. The liberating structure ensures clarifying the purpose of a scrum, improves scrum events, and improves the self-organizing capacities of teams.

The reason for liberating structure is the most popular in scrum is its simplicity that everyone can understand and learn it without others' help. The liberating structure is easily identified with five design elements and ten principles.


“Even weak become strong when they are united,” said Friedrich Von Schiller truly applies to liberating structure as it helps in improving the collaboration of individuals, teams, and organizations to unite and work with full impact in the right direction to gain scrum benefits.



About Advance Agility

We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium and large organization across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients, move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting human centric approach to business agility. Embracing the change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitor.


Connect with us at advanceagility.com to learn about SAFe and SAFe Implementation. We provide various SAFe certification courses along with DevOps, Scrum, Agile Coaching and more trainings. Write to us at contact@advanceagilty.com for any agile training or consulting needs. We are always looking for competent agile trainers as well. So if you are a good trainer or want to become one, do get in touch with us to that we can learn, grow and achieve together.

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