I was made aware of this post by Jeff Sutherland, based upon email conversations between himself, Scott Downey and Björn Granvik, CTO of Jayway.

It compares team efficiency when following a waterfall process versus following a Scrum process. Jeff invites us to take part of some of the conversation between MySpace's Scott Downey and Björn and the overall conclusion is that new Scrum teams do need shock therapy to get started. By bootstrapping teams, Scott managed to boost the team's performance to 240% of MySpace corresponding waterfall teams in only 2.9 days per team member, in average. I learned directly from Björn that a Jayway team working at a customer location had an increase in performance of ~400% in three months.

The key issue in most cases seem to be people in the Scrum team's surroundings with too much influence and too little understanding of how the Scrum Process works. This springs to mind a post I wrote a couple of years ago in frustration of trying to be agile in a non-agile environment. The meaning was to make that a series and I wonder if it isn't about time that I get some of my thoughts on helping organizations transition to agile down in writing.