Implementing a Professional Services Organization Using Type C Scrum

SolutionsIQ's professional services division dramatically improved project quality and team productivity through the adoption of Scrum and agile values, principles, and practices. The organization's original structure was typical of a consulting organization; functional silos (developers, testers, project managers) matrixed into project assignments. This model was misaligned with the team-based principals inherent in Scrum and agile. This misaligned organizational structure created inefficiencies and obstacles (waste) in team and departmental function. In an effort to improve this misalignment, the authors designed and implemented an innovative organizational model based on type C Scrum. This paper assumes the reader is generally familiar with agile and Scrum basics, and provides a cursory definition of type C; an advanced organization-wide extension of the simple Scrum project management wrapper. The paper provides a fairly detailed description of a specific instantiation of Scrum and agile organizational design in a 400 person services business