Many organizations get into Agile by doing a Scrum pilot project. They forget that the purpose of a pilot is to see how to promote Agile throughout the organization, not just a team. Scrum pilots typically always succeed, but don’t provide the necessary insights to go beyond the team.

It is common practice to start Agile by starting with getting a team to do Scrum. Unfortunately, for most organizations, the problems facing the organization are not about how teams work, but rather one of the following:

• Deciding on the right things to work on
• Working on too many things
• Allowing teams to be wantonly interrupted
• Getting teams to work together
• Technical debt
• Getting a solid understanding of what needs to be worked on
• Lack of automated testing

It is not difficult to create cross functional teams in siloed organizations to do Scrum and achieve a 3-10 times improvement. Unfortunately, doing so does not necessarily mean you can do this throughout the organization. When starting pilots, it is important to understand what you are trying to learn from the effort being undertaken.