Business and operational environments are becoming more and more frenetic, forcing companies and organizations to respond to changes faster. This trend reflects to software development as well, IT units have to deliver needed features faster in order to bring business benefits quicker. During the last decade, agile methodologies have provided tools to answer to this ever-growing demand. Scrum is one of the agile methodologies and it is widely used. It is said that in large-scale organizations Scrum implementation should be done using both bottom-up and top-down approaches. In big organizations software systems are complicated and deeply integrated with each other meaning that no one team can handle whole software development processes alone. Individual teams want to start to use Scrum before whole organization is ready to support it. This leads to a situation where one team is applying agile principles while most of the other teams and organizations around are continuing with old established non-agile practices. In these cases bottom-up approach is the only option. When the top-down part is missing, are the benefits also lost? In this case study, the target is to find out, did it bring benefits when implementing Scrum using only bottom-up approach. In the target unit, which was part of the large organization, Scrum based practices were implemented to replace earlier waterfall based approach. Analyses for the study were made on data, which was collected by survey and from a requirement management tool. This tool was in use during the old and new ways of working. Expression Scrum based practices are used because all of the fine flavours of Scrum could not be able to be implemented because of surrounded non-agile teams and official non-agile procedures. This was also an obstacle when trying to implement Scrum as well as it could be possible.
Most of the defined targets given to the implementation of Scrum based practices were achieved and other non-targeted benefit came out. In this context we can conclude that benefits were gained. The top-down approach absence clearly made the implementation more difficult and incomplete; however, it didn't prevent to get benefits. The target unit also faced earlier mentioned difficulties in using Scrum based practices while other units around used non-agile processes. The lack of good established numerical estimations of requirements' business values lowered the power of the Scrum on a company level, because these values were relative and subjective opinions of the business representatives, In the backlog prioritization, when most of the items are so called high priority ones there is no way to evaluate which one is more valuable and prioritization is more or less a lottery
