Too fast for Scrum? | AgilePT 2015
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Scrum adoption comes with relevant organizational challenges that some companies manage poorly.
First, there is the misconception that scrum, by itself, makes your teams faster. While contributing to quality, scrum can make your teams more productive, but a poorly designed agile process may turn your teams slower at the end.
Second, there is the misconception that the need to move hyper fast makes your backlog so organically alive that timeboxed sprints become impossible to achieve. We see a lot of companies moving to Kanban, as the epiphany of extreme agility. Sometimes, all they want is to avoid the huge challenges associated with organizing the work flows so that a stable development time window is provided to their teams. Priorities changing all the time, new stories popping up each day, the will to change anything, anytime, with the excuse that it is required by the customers, and lack of senior management commitment are typical drugs used to kill sprints and agile ceremonies.
Agility is not a process, it is a mindset, based on a culture, focused on delivering the most value as soon as possible. Taking scrum (or kanban) as a structured recipe for success and applying it as if we were making a delicious cake may, at the end, cause some stomach pains (and even food poisoning on extreme cases)!
10. even with all that….
may you get too fast for
Scrum?
11. “too fast” symptoms…
“It is a struggle to keep the sprint backlog stable during each sprint.”
“Priorities change daily… sometimes hourly…”
“Aren’t we spending too much time planning?”
“It looks we are being productive but not too effective…”
“We can’t support our maintenance efforts with timeboxed sprints.”
“Multitasking is increasing, we have devs working on too many small tasks at a time.”
“Some people talk about the cone of uncertainty. Our looks like a rectangle…”
12. “too fast” symptoms…
When “move fast” under uncertainty becomes the mission statement,
you start to see teams feeling that Scrum starts to block their agility.
Sprint backlog changes should be avoided in scrum, as a principle.
But building a stable environment for your team during the sprint
duration should not be an impossible mission….
15. “Scrum, by itself, makes your teams
faster”
A poorly designed agile process may turn your teams slower at the end!
16. “the need to move hyper fast makes your
backlog so organically alive that timeboxed
sprints become impossible to achieve”
17. “the need to move hyper fast makes your
backlog so organically alive that timeboxed
sprints become impossible to achieve”
Challenging…
hell yes…
but not impossible!
21. “The agile methodology is great”
There is no such thing as an “agile methodology”.
Scrum may be considered an agile based framework.
Remember, no recipes available!
22. “Scrum is based on the assumption
that teams are good at estimating”
23. “Scrum is based on the assumption
that teams are good at estimating”
Most of the team members are lousy estimators.
But they can improve continuously.
Scrum assumes that it is not possible to work with precise time based
estimations and promotes using intervals instead.
25. “Sprints are incompatible with having
maintenance work”
Yes, it is tricky! But you need to find your optimal strategy to deal with it.
And it is not impossible.
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