97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 87. The “MetaScrum” Pattern to Drive Agile Transformation

Alan O’Callaghan

The beauty of the Scrum Framework is that all it takes to get going is a self-organizing Development Team equipped with a skilled Scrum Master and an engaged Product Owner utilizing a rigorously time-boxed, inspect-and-adapt cycle. And then the joy begins. The work of the Scrum Team inevitably collides with the legacy processes of the wider organization and reveals, systematically, all the problems in its product development processes. It is often only at this point that it dawns on people that sustainable agility requires either significant changes in the wider organization or giving up on many of the benefits envisioned by the people introducing Scrum and needed to increase the organization’s agility.

Each organization needs to find its own path to Agile transformation, but a pattern occurring in many of them is “MetaScrum”.

The thumbnail for this pattern is well described by Jeff Sutherland, James O. Coplien, and the Scrum Patterns Group in A Scrum Book: The Spirit of the Game (Pragmatic Programmers, 2019):

Scrum Teams are in place, but direction (or the threat of interference) from legacy management structures causes confusion about the locus of control over product content and direction...Therefore: create a MetaScrum as a forum where the entire enterprise can align behind the Product ...