This Agile success story is drawn from the Agile Experience Report “Going FAST – When Scrum is slowing you down” written by Per Beining.
Six weeks. That was all the time left before a cloud-based ERP system needed to go live. After over a year of planning, coding, and careful coordination, two Scrum teams stood at the edge of their biggest milestone. The system had yet to deliver any usable results to its stakeholders. The business was watching. The pressure was real.
By all accounts, the teams were strong, skilled, experienced, and psychologically safe. Yet something was off. Despite doing Scrum “right,” the team was feeling slow, fragmented, and constrained. Scrum had become a comfortable pair of shoes that suddenly didn’t fit the terrain they were walking.
What unfolded next wasn’t a rejection of Agile, but a return to its roots. A shift from rituals to values. And what came out of it was a transformation that reshaped not only how work got done, but how people showed up for each other.
What was holding them back
Scrum in static mode
The problem wasn’t incompetence or confusion. The teams knew what to do. But their way of working had become too rigid for a situation that demanded speed, fluidity, and cross-functional thinking.
- Two-week sprints couldn’t keep pace with how fast new discoveries emerged.
- The division into two separate teams created skill silos that delayed work.
- Dependencies clogged the flow. The teams needed each other but were structured not to collaborate.
- The planning rhythm was out of sync with the rate of change.
What had once worked beautifully was now slowing them down. The clarity and control of Scrum had become a cage rather than a compass.
Agile as a living system
Breaking the frame with FAST Agile
The shift began with a bold move: adopting FAST Agile, a framework designed for scaling agility not through structure, but through trust in decentralized control and the intelligence of the collective.
Gone were the fixed two-week sprints. In came short 2.5-day cycles called Value Cycles. The two teams merged into one Collective. Every planning session became an Open Space—an impromptu marketplace of ideas and needs where team members pitched work and others self-selected where to contribute.
Agile values in full bloom
Collaboration: Team members broke free from silos and started pairing across disciplines. Mentorship became spontaneous and frequent.
Adaptability: The short cycles and self-organized work made it easy to pivot, respond to change, and stabilize the system post-launch.
Customer focus: Discovery work became everyone’s responsibility, not just the Product Owner’s. Feature Stewards emerged organically to guide refinement and prioritization.
Results that spoke for themselves
Delivery on time
The team launched successfully. A full system rollout, with trained end-users and a functioning, stable platform. FAST Agile enabled them to adjust dynamically and get over the finish line without burning out or breaking down.
Deeper team dynamics
- Psychological safety remained high even during pressure periods.
- People took more initiative and asked for help faster, thanks to the “Rule of Stuckness.”
- Pairing, cross-training, and mutual support became the norm—not the exception.
Resilience beyond launch
Even during summer vacations and post-release bugs, the team kept the same rhythm. Work didn’t stop. Momentum didn’t fade. FAST wasn’t just a process—it became a natural way of working.
Agile: Not a framework, but a force
This story isn’t about replacing Scrum or promoting one framework over another. It’s about understanding that Agile is a living system. When frameworks stop serving the team, it’s not a sign to double down on rules. It’s a cue to return to values.
What worked here was not magic. It was trust, transparency, and a willingness to experiment. Agile’s heart beats to the rhythm of teamwork, adaptability, and customer focus. And when those values lead, frameworks become flexible tools, not fixed templates.
Read the original Experience Report “Going FAST – When Scrum is slowing you down” written by Per Beining.
