Too often regarded mainly as an administrative function, HR service can be the revelator of the competiveness of a firm. The development of an organization, in an Agile or co-production mode, changes the role and the responsibilities allocated to the Human Resources Department (HRD).

1. [sKale] getting the most of both world: Scrum and HR
Pierre E. NEIS, Erik CHAPIER-MALDAGUE
coProcess S.A., 11 avenue de la Gare,
L-1611 Luxembourg, Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg
{pneis@coprocess.lu, echapiermaldague@coprocess.lu}
http://www.coprocess.lu
1. A B S T R A C T
We launched the [sKale] Project to address first Human Resources issues and then it
becomes evident that this on-going framework is evolving in a complete other way like Agile
organization. When we discovered Human Resources legitimate aspirations to be Business
Partner, we had remembered that IT’s got the same aims several years ago.
The management of people in organization is shared between Business Management and
Human Resources (HR). As true as Business is concerned by operations, lot of HR services
are kept far away from the front.
Too often regarded mainly as an administrative function, HR service can be the revelator of
the competiveness of a firm. The development of an organization, in an Agile or co-production
mode, changes the role and the responsibilities allocated to the Human Resources
Department (HRD).
While retaining the “Agile” values, the [sKale] project provides a realistic framework to allow
HRD to achieve its strategic development by becoming the key player in the definition of the
skills and positions assertiveness. Thus, HRD is value oriented and participates this way to
earn more market shares and more revenues for the whole organization.
Enhancing HR role turning it to the market ensures the ability to generate value for the entire
organization. The [sKale] for HR research has uncovered a new matrix of Agile enterprise
organizations involving humans, interpersonal relationships and customers in the heart of the
global Value Chain.
KEYWORDS: Agile Organization, Agile Enterprise, Human Resources, operational HR.
2. I N T R O D U C T I O N
Erik Chapier-Maldague is a Coach and expert in Human Resources and he knew my strong
engagement in Agile management techniques. He came to me with a special request
according to the escalation of Human Resource Department as a real business partner.
On my side, as a Scrum Coach, I also discover that “Agile Thinking”, where the Project
Management approach is very people centric, evolves in more “coaching” attitudes than pure
managing techniques.
This publication is relative to our common research about the etablisment of a HR
organization in Agile mode. We called this project the [sKale] project.
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2. 3. T H E C O N T E X T I N D E T A I L S
Our research started first by analyzing the different issues according to the specificities of the
HR context and the evolutions of large scaled Scrum projects.
a. T H E HR C O N T E X T
According to the HR outsourcing (HRO) bigger players, the maturity of HRO globally
shows that HR internal services focused more and more on strategic attitudes.
These new challenges are re-shaping internal HR services. To make it happens; the HR
Senior Management has to be empowered by the board as a solid Business Partner. It
surely helps to answer to:
 How to enroll in a mode of production that simultaneously increases profits, the
intrinsic value of the company and the feeling of Commitment to the firm?
 How to implement a continuous improvement of skills?
 How to succeed massive cultural changes, without a plan for "change
management"?
 How to develop operational presence for HR services?
 How could the organization rapidly rise up and assume the risk of growth
changes?
b. T H E S C R U M 1 C O N T E X T : E V O L U TI O N O F T H E S C R U M M A S TE R 2 R O L E A S A
COACH
Observing the good practices like mature Scrum Projects, we can see an evolution in the
role of ScrumMaster. As the initial set, ScrumMaster helps team to implement the
methodology in smooth transition and with hard engineering techniques. Then emerges
more organizational issues and a lot of communication defects: implementing self-
organized people concepts in a rigid structure can produce chaos aspects.
Teams are self-organizing with the support of a ScrumMaster who protects it from all
external impediments. So, that production team can focus on the release of what it is
committed to.
The evolution of the Scrum framework allows us to say that the process doesn’t deliver
only a “potentially shippable product increment” and a “leaner” process optimization but
also delivers on-going organization architecture. According to these facts, ScrumMaster
and Scrum Product Owner roles are evolving to management roles:
 Scrum Product Owner is accountable for the deliverables and value creation
 ScrumMaster is accountable for the whole “Process”: here “Process” groups both
Scrum Process and organization architecture.
The empirical process aspect of Scrum lets the whole Scrum Team (Team, ScrumMaster
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and Scrum Product Owner ) inspecting and adapting the whole framework after iteration
during the Retrospective Meetings. There is the place and time where emerging
dysfunctions can be revealed and solutions found, like: transparency, over-commitment,
lack of knowledge, conflicts, demotivation, etc.
1. Scrum is an Agile framework for completing complex projects. Scrum originally was formalized for software development
projects, but works well for any complex, innovative scope of work. The possibilities are endless. The Scrum framework is
deceptively simple. (Source Scrum Alliance)
2. ScrumMaster is the Process manager in the Scrum Project.
3. Scrum Product Owner is person who is accountable for the delivery of the Product into a Scrum Project.
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3. Our experience with Scrum reveals that the role of ScrumMaster let appear the need of
more coaching presence to go with individuals on a development pathway, for them and
so induced for their company.
c. T H E V I S I O N O F A N E W HR C E N TR I C F R A M E WO R K
During the development of this project we discovered that the “Agile thinking way” is in
line with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), part of the “[…]Europe 2020 strategy for
smart, sustainable and inclusive growth” supported by the European Commission.
To make that happen, to find some links between both Scrum and HR approaches, some
assumptions must be done:
 If HR Service wants to be a real countable actor in an organization they need to
be valuable. The values of HR’s are described beyond but they need also to have
a Process to fix maturity
 ScrumMasters are more involved in “Resource Management” and coaching
getting closer to HR’s because they are the keepers of HR’s values at the project
level
 Management aspects need to be redefined. To manage more efficiently self-
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organized people, we need servant-leadership. To have servant-leadership we
decide that management should be a part of the whole organization getting the
same values of sustainability than self-organized teams. Servant-leadership is
more emerging than a must. It’s based on:
o Leadership actions
o And the alignment of management processes.
4. T H E C O N C E P T : B U I L D I N G A N O R G A N I Z A TI O N L I K E A T E A M
The approach that we decide to follow is based on “Systems Thinking” who enables an
“Agile” oncoming to link people, programs and value (e.g. Declaration of Interdependence
©2005).
The challenge of the [sKale] Project was to create an ideal framework to keep the focus on
self-managed teams and “servant-leadership”. We do agree that those concepts sound a bit
“high level” but fact is that it works into Scrum Projects.
If we transpose the concept of Scrum into an organization, we must set up both “push” and
“pull” to keep balance.
 “Pull” gives people the freedom to achieve realistic goals adapted to their actual
competences,
 “Push” is reduced to border the organization’s scope: like initial Product Backlog +
Initial Roadmap + Vision in a Scrum Project.
4. Servant-leadership means that managers should literally serve, or be a servant to, their subordinates. This seems to be the
intention of the originator of the concept, Robert K. Greenleaf.
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4. The complexity is to face this new cultural challenge into the enterprise organization.
Building an organization as a team requires:
 Interactions
 Self-organization
 Co-evolution
 Co-production
Let us describe the framework top-down.
a. THE GOVERNANCE MODEL
Governance is the heart of the organization, there is the place where the enterprise Vision is
given and the roadmap to achieve it on strategical level.
The board “team” is composed of 5 members adding CEO and HRM (Human Resource
Manager). The board is working on the enterprise Portfolio like a Scrum Team but the main
difference is to handle with both projects and non-projects (like support and daily standard
tasks).
CEO is inspecting and adapting the enterprise backlog with two targets: Value Creation and
Time-to-market. HRM gives an input how the organization is reacting to change, gives the
feed-back on Resources Capacities.
This enterprise backlog is managed in a “Scrum-like” empirical process, decisions are been
taken according to “production” capacities. Here “production capacities” have to be
understood as “we have the people to do this”.
The Governance should measure 3 different outcomes:
 Product and services including customer satisfaction, value creation, opportunities,
innovations, risk and performance management
 Organization and architecture including employee engagement, business alignment,
resources management
 Process including standards and maturity
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5. b. THE PROGRAM LEVEL
We have seen that a pure project focus is no matter in an organization context where you
have to deal with productive and non-productive, with support and multi-projects teams, with
no project teams and administrative.
What happens with the teams when you do not have a single project?
1. Build a team
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2. Install Scrum Ceremonies
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3. Set up a management of the business portfolio with the help of Kanban and Visual
Management techniques.
We used Scrum as a common language between the people so administrative people can
understand IT people and IT people the management.
We have branded the framework [sKale] to make it neutral to all stakeholders and to use the
framework as a major part of company culture.
c. PEOPLE MANAGEMENT ISSUES
 SUSTAINABLE PACE FOR ALL
In Scrum, we make the focus on sustainable pace for the team inside a Scrum project
without any attention on what happens beside or outside the Scrum project: it is the
same in any Agile projects.
In organizational thinking, we want to extend the Agile framework to the whole
organization thus we should have sustainability for all the people: operational,
administrative, management, etc.
Managers do the best job if they only make their job. Splitting managers’ role into a
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democratic four eyes management helps each Manager or Scrum Product Owner to
be a coordinator and each ScrumMaster to act as a coach to be better in servant-
leadership.
 THE VALUE OF INDIVIDUALS IS KNOWLEDGE
Each people come into a “project” with a certain set of skills. During the project, new
skills are emerging, new trainings are done. What we want is to feed the learning
process coming from continuous improvement during “project” challenges.
We kept Scrum Ceremonies to foster coordination and team building. After each
Retrospective, the ScrumMaster takes the measure of earned knowledge facing the
objective that the team wants to reach during one sprint: measures are based on
effectiveness (lessons learned” and “experimentation). The impact of collecting those
information sprints after sprint creates a more positive feeling that biannual carrier
meetings do not attend.
Understand that everybody is different and difference is wealth
5. Scrum Ceremonies is the name for the Scrum Meetings that give the beat of the Scrum Process. These Ceremonies are:
Sprint Planning Meetings, Daily Scrum. Sprint Review Meeting, Retrospective.
6. Kanban is a tool and a framework to visualize the workflow.
7. Four eyes management is that every manager (with two eyes) cannot take a decision without the agreement of a pair
manager (with two more eyes), so that every decisions has been checked out twice for more safety.
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6. d. A NEW ORGANIZATION MATRIX
In our project, we redesigned the entire organization so that the values and goals amply
flourish.
The organizational engine in terms of management is based on basic concepts:
 Value Creation
 People engagement
 Customer satisfaction
Managing to combine these three elements, forces us to rethink the organization by making
it the most "operational" as possible. Making a more operational structure is possible
through the adoption of a project mode organization model.
A project mode organization model leads to high flexibility of the latter in its ability to develop
self-directed teams focusing on a dedicated project in the prescribed time. These teams are
made for the project and then dissolved, to integrate a new project.
The current model is built on verticality and any cross-units research is desired but seldom
understood or implemented. Setting up a cross-unit organization needs a new steering
mode and project alignment. This can be achieved through a governance-based portfolio
management and Project Management Office (PMO) model for alignment.
The managerial model is completely revised. Who is responsible? Who leads?
To understand the feasibility of this approach, management becomes participatory and each
project team is committed and is responsible for: creating value for the company,
involvement of individuals within the project, quality of its relationship with customers
(customer addressed by the project deliverables).
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Our initial organization matrix has been inspired by “Beyond Budgeting®” principles with a
particular focus on emerging leadership:
 “LEADERSHIP ACTIONS:
 setting fair and clear values, goals and boundaries
 improving hyper-productivity based on effectiveness and relative
targets
 promote transparency to support self-management
8. Beyond Budgeting®: was established over ten years ago its vision was to find steering mechanisms that could replace
budgeting and help to make organizations more adaptive to change (source BBRT).
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7.  ALIGNING PROCESSES WITH LEADERSHIP ACTIONS
 Goals are fixed for the team for each project
 Rewards are given to the Team and distributed to each individuals
 Planning: [sKale] provides planning instead of following a plan.
Planning is continuously improved
 Coordination is made continuously. The Coordination Team follows
the same objective that the project team: emerging values and
impediments are managed daily at least weekly
 Controls are simple and easy understandable: value, release (time),
empowerment, commitment and involvement
 Resources Management is made available when needed not
annually.”
e. FIXING OPERATIONAL HR
On the way to help HR’s to generate measurable value for the organization we couldn’t pass
through operational HR.
In our research, building an operational HR was perhaps utopia. But thanks to Scrum and
some “Beyond Budgeting®” principles like reducing the waste of back and middle office and
pushing the whole organization at the front that reinforced the idea that in the [sKale]
project, the ScrumMaster should be a HR representative.
Based on this assumption everything is starting to be clearer and logical. The Program
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Office is build on a “meta scrum” model where the organization matrix is driven by domain,
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areas and product lines and the “Scrum-of-Scrum” model has been integrated as a part of
the HR Department instead to be third party.
This add-on to ScrumMaster’s role creates the most of value at the hiring of new people.
When during a retrospective, hiring necessities are emerging; we add this task into the
“project” backlog so the self-managed team hires on its own a new candidate to insure their
commitment to the “project”. The ScrumMaster should have then the agreement to validate
team’s choice and report to administration for contracting.
At last, in an extreme case, the ScrumMaster should be enough empowered by the
organization and the team to dismiss people that impediment the team behavior and to
protect the team from itself.
9. Meta Scrum: is a high level Scrum structure organized around a Scrum Product Owner Team where the focus is given to
Product Definition and Work Breakdown structures.
10.Scrum of Scrum: The scrum of scrums meeting is an important technique in scaling Scrum to large project teams. These
meetings allow clusters of teams to discuss their work, focusing especially on areas of overlap and integration. (source Scrum
Alliance)
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8. These new responsibilities of ScrumMaster are only possible if the ScrumMaster is acting as
a coach with mentoring support.
f. GENERATING TOOLS TO SUPPORT THE NEW FRAMEWORK
To facilitate ignition and adoption of this new organizational approach, we needed to define
new smart tools to support the increasing amount of work and to optimize the decision
process of the governance board.
Our reflection pushed us to follow to major paths:
 a tool to collect HR emerging values like knowledge, competencies
 a tool to support the “pull” principle in project selection and emerging
innovation
 WCI: WORK LONG COMPETENCIES IMPROVEMENT
Objective of this HR tool is to design an effective picture of people-in-action in
the organization and to support the continuous improvement process. At the
early stage, WCI monitors:
 People’s aims and competencies
 Emerging competencies
 Measure the commitment to the “project”
It works like a wiki on organization’s intranet.
 IPM: INTERNAL PROJECT MARKET
IPM is a simple collaboration tool that could be translated as a trading room
inside the company.
This is an intranet or a wiki where you submit new projects to the whole
enterprise.
IPM has many interests:
 Having a productive pipeline with project proposals
 Optimizing the resources allocation skills and outcomes
 Self-initiative culture raising
 Motivation, involvement, sharing
Consider an example:
“John Doe is a member of a team dedicated to a project. During the
project, a new idea emerges and John discussed with his team. This
idea is interesting but it does not make sense in the current project.
This idea is enhanced by the ScrumMaster as an innovation and is
valued as such: John continues to lead the innovation.
This is recorded in the Lobby of IPM. The lobby area is where all the
emerging innovations are waiting for validation. As its name
suggests, the lobby should allow John to begin a discussion on the
project and assess its feasibility.
For that, John can invite some members of the company to test his
idea (the project is still public). After one week, or earlier if John
wishes, he may invite all persons of its choice in a discussion in a
meeting room and assess the interest it brings to it. If after that
meeting, John can build his team, the concept is fixed; he will present
it to the board for scheduling. John will be the Owner of the project.”
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9. 5. C O N C L U S I O N
The [sKale] project starts as pure research on Human Resource organization modelling and
we discover that a lot of people have been engaged that way according to a high level of
demand by the business.
To get an effective organization based on both value production and people behaviour, the
“project” model or “program” model was the first important step; consider knowledge and
competencies as a value was a second. The third step is the Scrum process: Scrum has been
designed for software development and we have customized it for global management
without big changes.
This conclusion is more or less a milestone in the deployment on the [sKale] approach: we set
up a keystone and now the deployment into organization has to improve the framework.
6. A B O U T T H E S K A L E P R O J E C T
The [sKale] Project has been developed into a program and it’s supported by a dedicated
Business Unit of coPROcess. This unit is driven by Erik Chapier-Maldague and strongly focus
on implement the framework at HR Department level with the support of Pierre Neis, Head of
PMO and Scrum Coach, who facilitate the concept of [sKale] into large scaled Scrum Project.
It’s first mission was to develop an Agile framework for HR’s and now the scope is enlarging to
the whole organization: governance, non-IT projects (IT Projects are done with Scrum), Venture
Capital, Transition Management, Assessments, Coaching, Sales & Marketing, Communication,
Support.
Keeping in mind that [sKale] has to be continuously improved, the [sKale] Unit has created two
work groups with professionals from HR’s and from Private Equities to challenge the
framework.
Their goal is to help companies being more flexible and reactive in a changing world.
7. R E F E R E N C E S
J. Sutherland and K. Schwaber, The Scrum Guide, Feb.2010
J.Hope and J. Fraser, Beyond Budgeting, Harvard Business School Press, 2003
B.Dusollier, Comprendre et pratiquer la Process Communication (PCM), InterEditions, 2008
Robitaille, Les cahiers de la communication interne Nr.25, AFCI, Dec. 2009
Software Engineering Institute, Appraisal Requirements for CMMI, Version 1.2, Aug. 2006
T.Sulaiman, AgileEVM: Measuring Cost Efficiency Across the Product Lifecycle, InfoQ, Oct.2007
D.Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, Bantam ,1995
8. D E F I N I T I O N S
 CSR: Company Social Responsibility, "A concept whereby companies integrate social and
environmental concerns in their business operations and in their interaction with their
stakeholders on a voluntary basis." (source European Commission)
 SYSTEMS THINKING is the process of understanding how things influence one another
within a whole. In nature, systems thinking examples include ecosystems in which various
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10. elements such as air, water, movement, plants, and animals work together to survive or
perish. In organizations, systems consist of people, structures, and processes that work
together to make an organization healthy or unhealthy. (source Wikipedia)
 BEYOND BUDGETING®: was established over ten years ago its vision was to find steering
mechanisms that could replace budgeting and help to make organizations more adaptive
to change (source BBRT).
 SCRUM: Scrum is an Agile framework for completing complex projects. Scrum originally
was formalized for software development projects, but works well for any complex,
innovative scope of work. The possibilities are endless. The Scrum framework is
deceptively simple. (source Scrum Alliance)
 META SCRUM: is a high level Scrum structure organized around a Scrum Product Owner
Team where the focus is given to Product Definition and Work Breakdown structures.
 SCRUM OF SCRUM: The scrum of scrums meeting is an important technique in scaling
Scrum to large project teams. These meetings allow clusters of teams to discuss their
work, focusing especially on areas of overlap and integration. (source Scrum Alliance)
 SCRUMMASTER is the Scrum Process manager in the Scrum Project.
 SCRUM PRODUCT OWNER is person who is accountable for the delivery of the Product into
a Scrum Project.
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