One way Teams Fail With Agile and How to Avoid It

 

A CST, in response to my post 'How Agile Fails', asked me “How can Agile fail? Agile is just some ideas shared.” Here's my answer

While Agile's not Scrum, it's pretty common so I'll use it as an example. Scrum has immutable roles, events, artifacts &rules. People are supposed to follow them as is. But since Scrum is based on empirical process control, little Lean, Flow, Theory of Constraints or organizational development is taught. When they have trouble they don’t know what to do. They try, but often can’t solve their problems- struggling while they have day jobs. So what happens is they sometimes substitute a bad practice for a Scrum one they can’t get to work. This often makes things worse.

I don’t blame the folks for abandoning Scrum given they are poorly prepared to adapt it to their needs and are even told not to (Ken Schwaber says "Scrum is simple, use it as is"

A way to fix it this to acknowledge Scrum is just one of many ways to do successful Agile. Scrum has many good practices–but there are no universal practices. People should think of Scrum as a starting point & be given a way to find practices better suited to them as needed. It may not be Scrum, but it may be successful.