Overcoming Challenges in Scaled Scrum: Enhancing Productivity with “Scrum Ninja”

As software products grow in complexity, organizations often scale Scrum by involving multiple teams working together. While the intent is to improve efficiency, many teams experience the opposite effect—reduced productivity and slower deliveries. This is a common challenge in large-scale Scrum implementations where coordination, communication, and alignment become bottlenecks.

In this blog, we will explore the core issues of scaled Scrum, why it often leads to inefficiencies, and best practices to overcome these challenges for better project outcomes.

Scaled Scrum is an extension of the traditional Scrum framework, designed to support large development efforts where multiple Scrum teams collaborate to build a single product. Popular frameworks for scaling Scrum are Scaled Agile Framework, Scrum@Scale and Nexus. Each of these frameworks introduces mechanisms to align teams, improve collaboration, and manage dependencies. However, in practice, organizations often struggle with implementation, leading to inefficiencies.

Why Scaled Scrum Reduces Productivity:

1. Communication Overhead:

• As the number of teams grows, cross-team coordination becomes challenging.
• Scrum of Scrums (SoS) meetings add additional layers of communication, sometimes leading to misalignment instead of clarity.
• Information gets lost in translation between different teams, product owners, and stakeholders.

2. Teams Working in Silos:

• Teams often focus only on their part of the project without visibility into the broader goal.
• Dependencies between teams lead to delays as one team waits for another to complete their work.

3. Bug Ownership:

•  When customer escalation coems, to align to right team takes time as multiple team needs to look the issue to find actual root cause of the issue.
• Bug ownership delay leading to inefficiencies.

4. Too Many Meetings, Too Little Progress:

•  The need for cross-team coordination results in excessive meetings that reduce the time available for actual development.
•  Meetings such as Scrum of Scrums, PI Planning (in SAFe), and coordination calls often consume developers’ focus time.

5. Ineffective Dependency Management :

• If dependencies are not well-managed, they cause blockers, slowing down deliverables.
• A lack of clear ownership results in delays as teams wait on each other for critical components.
• Minor changes and dependencies from other team causes delay in deliverables.

How to Overcome These Challenges:

Organization try to overcome this challenges by below traditional way,

1. Improve Cross-Team Communication:

• Replace lengthy meetings with asynchronous updates (e.g., Slack, Confluence dashboards, or Jira reports).
• Foster direct collaboration between developers from different teams instead of relying solely on Scrum Masters or Product Owners to relay messages.

2. Create a Shared Product Vision and Roadmap :

• Clearly define and communicate the product vision across all teams.
• Use a single, prioritized backlog for all teams to ensure alignment.
• Hold periodic alignment sessions where all teams discuss the overall direction and dependencies.

3. Strengthen Dependency Management :

• Identify dependencies early in the planning phase and address them proactively.
• Use tools like dependency maps to visualize and track inter-team dependencies.
• Introduce clear ownership of critical dependencies and align delivery timelines accordingly.

“Scrum Ninja” :   

“Scrum Ninja” is a one who has deep knowledge in both reviewing the code and fixing the bugs. “Scrum Ninja” responsibilities are  in case of any customer escalations, Scrum Ninja’s can meet together on demand. Find the root cause of the issue and decide which scrum team should own the defect. Decide ownership on the meeting by their expertise.  In case of minor changes in the component required for the dependency team and it can be done by dependency team, let other team do the changes to fasten the development. Scrum team “Scrum Ninja” can review the code and ensure that code can be merged by dependency team. More than 70% of dependency is minor code changes and this would unblock the dependency on other teams.

• • • Approve minor changes of scrum team components made by dependency team
    •  Engage in customer escalation on-demand

Conclusion :