A lot of teams get stuck with Project-o-Scrum.
That’s when there’s an attempt to use Scrum events as a wrapper around a project management structure, without any shift in the power structure.
Rather than a pathway to team autonomy, empowerment and reduction in business risk, Scrum is used as a way to control teams and micro-manage individuals.
That’s not saying you won’t see improvements; the transparency and focus you’ll get might give a 20% improvement in productivity. But increased productivity is not our goal. We might be busily building the wrong thing, that customers don’t need, based on the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO) not evidence and data.
There’s some key red flags to look for
– a fixed, canned backlog of requirements, tortured into a user story format
– user stories created by the Product Owner, not through user-story-mapping
– the Sprint Goal is a list of features to deliver, not an outcome for the product
– you have a Sprint Demo to management, not a proper Sprint Review
– there’s no Retrospective, or the team hates it because nothing changes
– the Scrum Master acts as a Project Coordinator and administrator
– Work is allocated to developers, who work by themselves on items
– You hear “There’s nothing for me to do” at Sprint Planning
– Velocity and “features delivered” are performance metrics
– There’s a fixed “use it or lose it” pot of money
If this is your reality then it’s time to change things up.
That might mean developing a skill set around “courageous conversations”…
