Question: The CEO of our small company (14) asked me to introduce some elements of Scrum into the working process of our development team.

Problem is: the piece he would like to see introduced is not really the main part. It mainly the daily scrum meeting.

The problem is that to introduce Scrum completly would force him to change his own work (constitue backlog, define content of sprints, and so on), and he obviously doesn't want that...

I can see the benefits of introducing these small bits of Scrum. Better communication of the team, mainly, as we have no CTO, it's rather a self-organizing team anyway.

I have also some hopes that ones we have begun with Scrum, we could further integrate the method.

Do you have seen something like this yet? How does it turn out?

Answer: 
Contrary to Bartosz, **I believe that short, daily meetings are something which actually can perfectly work in many different environments, even when it is virtually the only practice taken from Scrum.**

What more I know teams, and quite a few of them, which tried Scrum, then abandoned it, and the only practice they still exercise is daily meetings. And they even point it as the best thing from Scrum -- no surprise since they dropped every other.

Anyway, daily meetings are all about exchanging information within the team and they aim to make it in a very light-weight way. This means chances are good people will actually see the value. So I'd definitely try this one out.

**However I don't have much hope it is a good starting point to introduce Scrum as a whole.** Starting with Scrum is a revolution for vast majority of teams. Different team model, different process and a bunch of new practices to follow. It's often hard to make transition to Scrum sustainable as people naturally oppose revolutions and that will be the force which would be hard to overcome with step-by-step Scrum implementation.

**If you think about incremental changes of the team Kanban seems as if it's a better tool to support such ongoing change.** Actually Kanban is often dubbed change management approach and, if I understand correctly, that's what you want to do. Kanban also assumes nothing really changes on the day 1, but then unveils issues and incentivize people to improve the way they work.
Seems like he's really missing the point of Scrum. Just the Daily Scrum is like having just the foam of a cappuccino. Granted it is an integral part of Scrum and it is a great litmus test for how well the team is working together but on it's own it just doesn't make sense. Maybe a communication problem. I wonder if you could go back to your CEO and ask him some open-ended questions about what it is about Scrum that he finds appealing.