| The process isn't a silver bullet. I've worked on scrum agile projects for 5 years at a consultancy, for a variety of projects and clients, so I've seen it work and I've seen it not work. Scrum agile works when... - People keep standup updates short and sweet, so standups take 15 minutes or less. - Your team has a single product owner who speaks to customers and is empowered to make decisions. - Team members invest time and energy into backlog grooming/refinement, ensuring stories are thorough and have good requirements. - The team retros regularly to address issues. - The team communicates often outside of the regular ceremonies, so that meetings stay focused. Scrum works poorly when... - Standups turn into 30 minute to 1 hour "status" meetings where everyone brings up every question they have. - The product owner isn't empowered to make decisions, or your team has multiple product owners who decide by committee. - Team members are disengaged or not even consulted during backlog refinement, and stories are missing critical requirements that you have to deal with in the middle of the sprint. - Retros get cut because "there's not enough time". - Nobody talks outside of the regular ceremonies, so meetings drag on forever. Scrum agile doesn't work for every organization and every project. Sometimes company culture is too hard to change. Sometimes the work you're doing can't really be done in an agile way. Sometimes the organizational structure makes it hard for a scrum team to work without consulting multiple layers of bureaucracy. (That's my project right now, and it is NOT fun.) When that happens, you have to either relax the rules of scrum (being careful to avoid the pitfalls I mentioned above), or adopt a different process altogether. |