Controversial opinion: Scrum doesn’t really work.
To be specific, I’ve never seen it work properly in client-vendor software delivery.
Perhaps I haven’t been on the right projects but with about 30 years experience in consulting, I’ve seen quite a few.
I believe that scrum has value in a product company or an internal Centre of Excellence where the project team is the same and their estimation and velocity is built on deep relationships and understanding of the business operations and culture of the organisation.
Agile mindset and incremental forward motion ensures their survival.
However this does not really apply to consulting partners who are engaged to help an organisation make a significant step change from State A (current state) to State B (some desired future state).
Let’s not do something because it’s trendy or its “How we did it before and it seems to work OK”. 🙄
Let’s apply critical thinking and ask questions.
“Does it work?”
“What does success mean?”
“Why why WHY are we doing it this way when it clearly doesn’t deliver value?”
“What are we protecting?”
“WHO are we protecting?”
“Who feels threatened by change to the status quo?”
It’s only when we ask difficult questions and we are prepared to dig deep, be honest and hear the difficult answers that we can progress.
Doing so is not easy, but it will allow us to do work that we can be proud of.
It allows us to truly be creative when solving wickedly impossible problems.
That’s what we want to be doing.
The following points below just got me nodding my head so vigorously that it almost fell off! 😵
“6. We measured how much it cost to deliver one story point and then wrote contracts where clients paid for a package of “500 story points.”
7. Management lost it when they found that 500 story points in one project weren’t the same as 500 story points on another project. We had many meetings to fix this.”
Maybe I’ve seen one done properly, and that was on your project Ryan Nast but I think the client really immersed themselves into this way of working and that’s what worked for them.
I’d love to hear from #salesforce and Microsoft partners on this topic – or any software vendor for that matter.
I’m big enough to accept that I can be wrong, so if you have a different point of view, I’d really love to hear from you.