Scrum at Yahoo and Google AdWords. Short summary

October 29, 2007 by Artem

Short summary on the Jeff Sutherland's story about how and why Scrum has been taken into use by Yahoo and Google AdWords.

Yahoo story
1. At some point Yahoo was a lot of "organic" company. There were many small teams with power to do pretty much anything with rather little discipline present.
2. They needed more structure and consultants gave them 300 pages long heavyweight process. Everybody hated it and it did not really work
3. They saw Scrum as a possibility to go back to their roots, while still having some structure in place. Nowadays a lot of new product development is done with Scrum at Yahoo

Google AdWords story
1. In 2001 there were quite many managers at Google. They tended to tell smart people not to do this or that. So Google got rid of those managers
2. Then there used to be many organic teams of three people with rotating leadership. About 160 teams reported to a single person - it was quite ok since teams didn't wait to be guided. Still business-to-business applications needed more customer input, than consumer apps. Google especially mentioned localization issues - many things had to be consistently translated into many languages
3. Scrum appeared to be some kind of a compromise. Scrum hierarchy is as close to the organic groups as possible, but still has some structure and allows for easily seeing the high level picture and priorities. Scrum allows AdWords group for having a leadership driven organization with some rules.

Do you know how agile processes were taken into use by some other large organizations?

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