[outsidetheparty]

> If your organisation can't commit to you working full (pretty much) time on a project working on a set of things that have been committed to without pulling you in another direction

See, this is the thing: on the one hand it's supposed to be all about committing to a specific direction ahead of time and not letting yourself be pulled somewhere else -- on the other hand it's supposed to be all about developers being empowered to work on what's most important at the moment (I mean it's right there built into the name!) Those seem in direct conflict.

We don't have organizational pressure pulling us in different directions -- we have reality pulling us in different directions. I'm not going to tell a customer "no, you can't have that bug fix or that new feature yet, we have a Methodology to follow."

> "Project Managers" don't exist in Scrum.

Right. Just project owners, product owners, scrum masters....

> In your case it seems like you've had something foisted on you by external people talking out of their rear.

I think you're onto something there. (They keep changing their minds, too: one week it's fibonacci sizing, next week it's T-shirt sizes. One week it's scrums, next week it's kanban. The actual working process seems to stay the same, only the jargon shifts around.)

[cmdkeen]

>developers being empowered to work on what's most important at the moment There's the problem, the "moment" is the sprint. If you're need for a flexible time frame is less than a week then Scrum isn't going to work for you. There are other methodologies that might work (Kanban say), but I'd also question whether you're doing pure development or mixing in support as well.

> "Project Managers" don't exist in Scrum. > Right. Just project owners. Uh huh. "Product Owners" should never, ever, ever be Project Managers or anything like them! They're supposed to be from the business end of things. The worst projects I've ever seen in Scrum land have been developing for project manager's needs (the only time PMs get to be POs) and it went horribly because they act like project managers not business people focusing on what they actually need the product to do.

If your consultants are confusing Kanban and Scrum then I'd run screaming for the hills. I've literally just come out of a retrospective where we had a discussion about switching from Scrum to Kanban for a load of impact analysis heavy work, they are different beasts both good at different things.