Updated October 2026. This post was originally a short announcement that a client engagement had become a Scrum.org case study. It's still one of the clearest examples I have of a lesson I keep seeing: a team can do every Scrum ceremony on schedule and still not get agile out of it. Intralinks had done exactly that, and the fix wasn't more process. It was the values underneath the process, and a hard focus on what "done" means. That's the same conversation I have with teams today, whether they call what they do Scrum or not. The original post is below, lightly cleaned up, followed by what the case study reported.
A while back, we helped Intralinks revive and reinvigorate their use of Scrum for delivering done, working software. Intralinks is a SaaS provider of virtual data rooms for the M&A industry. Their first Scrum adoption, starting in 2012, was a "mechanical" one: done in good faith and with a lot of hard work, but it didn't deliver the agility they were after. The reboot focused on the principles and the Scrum values instead.
Our part of the effort was the training. Over a couple of months, I trained roughly 200 of their software developers, software testers and managers, as a Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainer, using the Professional Scrum Foundations and Professional Scrum Product Owner courses.
We're pleased to say this turned into a Scrum.org case study: Intralinks Case Study: Scrum Reboot, This Time With the Values, written by Richard Gratton of Intralinks and Dave West of Scrum.org (2017).
In their first attempt at attaining agility, Intralinks took a well-intentioned "mechanical" implementation of Scrum, done in good faith and with lots of hard work, but failed to deliver against their goal of greater agility. So they took on a "Scrum Reboot" and succeeded by augmenting the mechanics of Scrum with the fundamental idea of inspection and adaptation and the Scrum Values of Courage, Focus, Openness, Respect and Commitment. These provided the cultural environment necessary for success. Intralinks made the Scrum Values real by focusing on six principles: self-organization, done means done, empowered Product Owners, servant-leader Scrum Masters, Scrum Team ownership for adaptation, and the delivery of business value.
What the case study reports
The case study is candid that this was still a work in progress when it was written, with real successes on some teams and continuing struggles on others. With that caveat, here is what it reports changed:
- A planned monolithic re-implementation of the UI became a rolling program, with releases almost monthly.
- Technical debt that had been deferred to "hardening" sprints was eliminated.
- One very large team run by a "Scrum Manager" was split into two smaller teams with the designers integrated into them, with lower running costs and greater velocity.
- Developers, not managers, trained as Scrum Masters (PSM I) and took on the role.
- Retrospectives were held consistently, with an improvement backlog that was acted on every Sprint.
- Sprint Reviews showed done software and tracked business value after release.
The acknowledgments credit the back-to-basics, experience-driven training. The line I'm proudest of: "He did an amazing job of reminding us all that Scrum is an empty thing without the Scrum Values and focus on Done."
Where this fits today
This is one of the case studies on the site, and the only one with a named client and an independent, third-party write-up. The others are anonymized, but the pattern is the same one: the problem everyone thinks is about process or tooling usually isn't.
If your team is doing the ceremonies and not getting the results, that's the conversation my workshops are built for. Or just get in touch and tell me what you're seeing.
-Ben
