Avoid a red card in Scrum

 

When I started this Scrum blog over a year ago, I was encouraged by all the positive attributes of Scrum, and its scalable parents such as LeSS, DaD, SoS, Nexus, SAFe etc. SAFe is what I have been working with since 2018. Having said that, the benefits of Agile and Scrum can only be realized if they are being implemented correctly, and by correctly I mean in terms of the process, regularity, and consistency. In my experience, this is not the case with almost every organisation I have been exposed to.

Here’s some basic examples specific to Scrum. In my own workplace, standups dropped from daily ceremonies to twice a week. Not everyone stands up. The timebox is rarely met (in one case it went twice as long). It is not encouraged to ask questions nor discuss topics at any length during a daily standup, and yet they often are. Almost every participant talks about what they have on today, but rarely anything about yesterday or what they have been working on. This becomes even more important when the daily standups have been reduced to (in our case) twice a week. There are team stand-ups at the program and portfolio level, but very rarely at the project level, where the delivery of value actually takes place. Some critical team members have never been invited to team/project standups, such as testers who are so crucial to governance. The customer is involved to some degree in PI (Program Increment) planning sessions, but rarely throughout the sprint. Retrospectives per value stream are either not held or ineffective, and there is no review ceremony that involves customers to see the progress of incremental delivery, other than the occasional status report or update over the phone or email. I could go on, but I want to end on a positive note.

As my Scrumptious blog bio states: “Scrum is the most popular framework used within an Agile environment to convert complex problems into valuable products and services”. I still hold to this view. But it is up to us as project and Scrum professionals, or team members in a Scrum environment, to pick up the ball and run it through the goal line. When something is not right, call it out. It is for the benefit of the team, project and organization as a whole.

Don’t get a Scrum penalty. Kick a Sprint goal instead.
    

Thank you for your interest in the Scrumptious blog. If you have any ideas for Scrum topics, please message me here. Until next time, remember, projects can be Scrumptious!