Scrum does not work!

 

Frederik was the chosen. He got the job to coordinate the introduction of Scrum in the company as a lot of companies started with Scrum recently and applicants ask for Agile development. Frederik invited a big consulting company to support him. They did some basic trainings with all employees, and some were asked to do the Scrum Master certification. Department teams have been regrouped into Scrum team with a previous project manager as new Product owner.

The setup was complete, Frederik was promoted to the Agile coach as he was involved in most of the Agile changes.

Anna, Steve and Martin became Scrum Master and they really dig into the topic. They cared that the Scrum events are held, did a great job with facilitating the meetings. The new product owners got their input from their stake holders within the company, mostly salespersons and other project manager. It was important that the Scrum team deliver faster to increase revenue. The company grew in the past years always more than 10%, with Scrum it should be even more.

The initial retros were filled with a lot of topics and the workflow within the team was improved. Scrum seems to be shining after some sprints: daily’s are timeboxed to 15 minutes, sprint planning and retro is working fine. For the review, stake holders do not attend now as they expect that the team just deliver in time.

After some month, developer mentioned they have so much to do now as the team should be self-organized. This slows down the team. At the same time more and more must have requirements came via the PO to the team.

Then a major release came, and a lot of customers updated and reported several issues. The product teams had a lot to fix and the feature pipeline was delayed. Project manager started to have the opinion that Scrum does not work, they do not get their needed software in time even if they have a deadline with the customer.

In addition to that the team wants to improve usability and do some refactoring’s in the software. As this is not related to a certain revenue, these requests are postponed and the team reduced their job in deliver requested features.

 

Scrum does not work ... if you just install Scrum teams within a Waterfall oriented organization. It needs an Agile environment to get the full potential otherwise there are always some methodic divides. These break lines are poison for the company and needs to be addressed. Then Agile can spread  and on that any Agile Framework can grow.

Compared to a digital break line in a workflow where you have first a paper and then a digital workflow, you see this immediately on introducing the digital workflow. When you change a method, the break lines are invisible and pop up one after another. Within the team, the retro catches up a lot of them. But within the organization it gets difficult as a change in process often comes along with a change of power.

 

And believe, Agile (and Scrum) works!