Witnessing the most beautiful transformation in a long-standing restaurant brand — the most fulfilling CSM class I’ve ever taught
On September 10–11, 2025, during a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) corporate workshop, Shin Yeh Group—a 48-year-old Taiwanese culinary brand specializing in Taiwanese cuisine with over 1,000 employees and three Michelin-recognized restaurants—embarked on a meaningful agile transformation experiment.
The participants, mostly senior executives with more than 20 years of experience and an average age over 50, initially showed strong resistance to both learning and certification. The course focused on the pain point of "labor shortage," introducing practical applications of Scrum to facilitate cross-departmental collaboration and co-creation of solutions, including the design of an app to address the group’s staffing challenges. During the process, executives anonymously disclosed the real root causes of the labor shortage for the first time, working together to propose viable solutions—demonstrating a positive shift in organizational culture. In the end, all participants successfully passed the CSM exam. This was not merely the adoption of a management tool, but a crucial starting point for a legacy enterprise to reconstruct its communication, decision-making, and learning mechanisms through agile thinking.