This document discusses adopting the Scrum framework in software development companies in Bangladesh. It outlines some key opportunities for adopting Scrum, such as helping interested companies transition to Scrum and educating the industry about Scrum practices. It also describes several challenges to Scrum adoption in Bangladesh, including a lack of experience with Agile methods, cultural issues with self-managing teams, and limited formal education on Scrum. The document then provides recommendations for how to address these challenges, such as educating management, starting small pilot projects, and empowering teams to transition to Scrum practices over time.

1. ADOPTING SCRUM IN
BANGLADESH
Opportunities, Challenges and Outcomes

2. M. Mizanur Rahman
CEO, Informatix Technologies
CSM,CSP
Leading Agile Bangladesh community

3. Bangladesh Software Industry
 Software and IT service industry in
Bangladesh has crossed a long road over the
last few decades.
 It has matured and considered among the
potential sector to contribute in our economy in
coming years
 The growth rate has increased significantly in
last few years for IT friendly policies of
government

4. Snapshot of the Industry - size
1000+
companies
US$ 400 million
Revenue
70,000 + Professionals

5. Business Specialization of IT
Companies
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
BASIS survey
BASIS survey

6. Company Sizes
# Of Employee
10-30
30-50
50-100
100+

7. Mainly focused on outsourcing
# of companies
Outsourcing
Local Market

8. Project Management System
Adopted by these companies
90% of the companies want to move to Agile
Waterfall
Agile
Nothing
RUP/XP

9. Opportunities
 Help those companies who are interested, to
move in Scrum
 Guide the companies who are currently using
Scrum in their organization
 Educate people related to the industry about
Scrum and adoption process in Bangladesh

10. Challenges
 Based on the summary of these data, we can
easily identify some challenges
 Some of those are related to experience,
knowledge, culture and practices
 Some can be changed easily and some are
not

11. Management Dilemma
 Most of the companies owned by
businessman who do not have formal
knowledge about IT industry.
 Do not believe in the concept self managing
teams
 Negligent about changes in the organization
 Do not want to invest their time and money to
understand and adopt something better.

12. Self Management – team
members
 We love to get managed by others
 Self management = freedom unlimited
 Lack of understanding in commitment and
professionalism
 It is always good to have someone asking for
work update and control of the flow
 Not enough time for learning something related
project management
 Not motivated enough which leads to take them
the work as job , not as career
 Only motivation comes in form of benefits.

13. Proper Agile Knowledge
 No formal education is provided on Agile in
Bangladesh (university or professional
organizations)
 Mostly relies on online resources which leads
to confusion or ambiguity
 Not many full adoption of Scrum. Mostly partial
adoption and modified ones
 Not so many CSM, CSPO
 ScrumAlliance certified trainer visited
Bangladesh for the first time this year to
conduct CSM course

14. Outsourcing – remote teams
 Most of the clients from USA, Europe or
countries with minimum difference of 4 hours
 Improper split of the teams across different
locations
 Un-usual office hours to accommodate scrum
rituals
 Lack of qualified Scrum personals in all
locations

15. There are lots of Scrumbut…
 We follow scrum but we do not have a product
owner.
 We follow scrum but we do not have
retrospective
 We follow scrum but we have hour long daily
meeting (not standup)
 We follow scrum but it is not time boxed
 We follow scrum but only the visual task board

16. Baffled with early challenges
 Many companies stopped scrum after first few
sprints as things seemed uncontrollable to
them
 The chances of returning to scrum for those
companies are very low
 Time and cost for adaptation is a major
concern
 Missing scrum readiness throughout the
organization
 Mostly go with buzz word rather than actual
research on organizational fitness.

17. Solutions
 After working with different companies and the
community in Bangladesh, we have adopted
different solutions to address those problems
 These solutions are specific to particular
companies and might not work same way for
others.

18. Solving Management Problem
 First focus on educating company
managements (CXO, Directors etc) about
Scrum and how company can get benefitted
by this
 Give them an proper understanding of ROI in
the long run by adopting Scrum
 Help them get it running with a small pilot
project and later adopt it to full organization.

19. Making everyone self managed
 Educate resources about motivation, career
and over all management practices
 Take Scrum session at office on regular basis
 Adopt Scrum fully in the organization and get
help from expert where it is required.
 Get rid of the habit of micromanagement and “I
am your boss” culture
 Make them part of the success and failure

20. Educating about Scrum
 That’s where we are working for last few years
 We are providing free “Introduction to Scrum”
courses for company owners ,engineers
,managers and other resources.
 8 hour long session focuses on the detail about
scrum, working with remote teams and adopting
scrum in Bangladesh
 Provided training more than 300+ people in last 6
months
 Managing first and largest agile group in
Bangladesh in social media.

21. Starting Scrum from Top to
bottom
Step 1
• Management (CEO, CTO, Directors, Investors etc) must have clear
idea about scrum
• Learn from Agile/Scrum professionals rather than own intuition
Step 2
• Start with a small team as pilot project
• Train the team about scrum paradigm
Step 3
• Give team time to understand scrum and try to motivate them to be
self managed. As a nation, we are not used to with self
management properly.
• Do not force them to start immediately

22. Step 4
• Run a test or small project for first time
• Get help from experts during the first few iterations
Step 5
• Measure teams output with expected results
• Try to find out where team is struggling and fix
those
Step 6
• Keep patience during the whole transformation
• It can take few weeks to few months for a team to
adopt

23. Step 7
• Once the team outputs the expected result, try to repeat it for other
teams
• It can work as a base for others
Step 8
• Always plan, execute and adopt. Do not assume that team
understood scrum properly and no need to invest time on study
• Empower team members, give them opportunity to understand
themselves
Step 9
• Keep a budget for whole transformation
• You might not get an immediate result during the whole
transformation process

24. Success stories