Scrum in Indian It Ecosystem

Back in 2010-11 when Scrum was just picking up in the Indian IT ecosystem, I did a little digging around with the help of our best friend "Google" and many of the things looked alien. The way we have been taught as to how Software/IT delivery works (the waterfall way), SCRUM looked a radical idea which was questioning the well established norms. And since I was a relative newcomer to the industry (3 yrs of industry experience), and not seeing many in the organization talking about it, I thought might be SCRUM is just another floating buzzword. That was the end of my tryst with scrum back then.

Over the next few years, with my growing experience in the industry and having been part of few end to end software delivery and consulting projects, I thought to myself, things could have been done better. From the way requirements were gathered, to defining timelines, to actual development lifecycle, things were done in a very ad-hoc manner.

Below were some of the pricking pain points:

Sales and SOW were prepared by a team which was never part of the actual project delivery.

Requirements gathering was assumed to be a one time process.

Software development was in a typical waterfall model.

Less productivity as teams would be idle for certain duration of the project.

Without a process being in place most of the times teams would be stretched because of unclear and ever changing requirements during the development cycle, not taking into account the impact of such changes in the delivery timelines.

Customer involvement only during the beginning and the end of the delivery phase.

But then, even with such issues, things would inadvertently get done and the machine would cog along. That's because,