Hi, Scrum Master community!
Mike Beedle made this strong statement before he died.
“I admire, respect, cherish, support, and acknowledge @jeffsutherland for the invention, creation, and support of Scrum framework… but it is TIME.We must move FORWARD!Be proud Jeff… you created LEADERS that will follow your footsteps!”
Are we missing some criticism here?
What do you think about it? Is there something that doesn’t make sense to you about the agile industry and the concept of Scrum? Or is there nothing to fix? Can we say that everything is perfect with this incomplete framework?
I think the “agile industry” makes a lot of sense, but only in the light of the speculative IT boom that we have enjoyed for the last 10-12 years.
The nature of a low-cost-of-capital environment is to drive speculative investment. Speculative investment is based on some assumed future value, rather than the return (profits/dividends) that the investors get from owning the company.
The emphasis to growth metrics – more users, more events, more people, bigger brand identity and so on rather than financial ones.
You have too much money chasing too few things; things in this case include:
– skilled knowledge workers
– investment opportunities
Which tends to drive up prices and cost. Share prices and market valuations increase, and so do wages. People see the wages and a gold-rush economy kicks off.
You get boot-camps for developers, of course, but also for things like Scrum, SAFe and all of the other branded agile/lean approaches with their books, courses, gamified badges, certificates, bodies of knowledge and brands.
What has *not* been happening in many companies is a ruthless focus on lean concepts, especially around building quality in to reduce costs. In fact as the cash comes rom investors (not sales) the tendency is to keep them happy with new features, zombie-scrum style, while focussing on vanity metrics (rather than quality or cost)
A quick look at companies finances and you can sort the sheep from the goats, as it were. There are those who have billion dollar revenues but make no profit, despite a decade of cheap money to make it happen. In fact they are still spending $3 to make $2. Some of these are hailed as being “really agile”. Hmmm….
Of course those who wrote The Manifesto For Agile Software Development had ridden out this boom-bust economy before, in the dot-com boom. So they could see what was happening.
Scrum takes a lot of stick or this, but it’s a framework, and one that most people don’t really follow. They don’t give their teams product autonomy, often because they don’t have the core business and leadership experience in those teams.
And that’s back to “too much money chasing too few people”, the desire for growth at any cost, and the agile industrial complex.
And it’s also the nature of speculative bubbles….