Mother in law or coach?

 

About a decade ago Mike Dwyer wrote an interesting blogged called “Scrum is a Silver WHAT and you want to put it WHERE?” The idea is that Scrum’s power is in showing us what is not working (the mirror). It starts us down a nice path and anything that blocks it must be removed.

I’ve always viewed this as a “mother-in-law” approach – tell me what I’m doing wrong, but don’t tell me how to fix it. The issue that many in the Scrum community ignore is, of course, that merely seeing an impediment does not mean you can figure out how to solve it. Taking a minimalist approach may identify your problem but may not give you enough guidance to get out of it.

Scrum provides a framework within which a cross-functional team can work to solve its problems. It’s a good one – for a team. But nowadays very few teams are cross-functional and work alone. So now, besides the fact the people may or may not have the wherewithal to solve their problems, they are faced with the issue of how do I get to the pre-conditions to do Scrum?

Instead of saying Scrum is founded on empiricism and Lean, it’d be good to blend some Lean into it and remove what’s not Lean from Scrum. That could create Scrum as a guide.