Scrum Won’t Always Work

Well, this is my fourth refactoring of this post. This was supposed to be a quick one! I fully intended on this post explaining why Scrum will always work. Simple! But, as I thought through this, and kept rewriting my post, I’ve completely changed my tune.

What does it mean for Scrum to “work”? I’m going to define “working” as “delivering more to your customers with higher quality than you did before and continuously getting better”.

Does Scrum always work? In my opinion, no. It depends on the type of team that is being introduced to Scrum whether nor not it will work.

The Team that Rocks

If you have a team that is consistently delivering value, is a cross-functional “team” and not a group of individuals, is continuously improving and has a good, productive relationship with their customers where the customers define what they want and collaborate with the team, then Scrum may set them back. I believe that the additional overhead in the form of sprint reviews, retrospectives, sprint and release planning, and daily stand-ups that Scrum adds may make an already high performing team less productive. The team, in some form, is already doing something that produces the same results as these activities. For these types of teams to improve, Kanban is likely be more appropriate.

The Team that Does Not Rock

I really wanted to title this “The Team that Sucks”, but I thought that would be too offensive. Anyway…Given a team that is not consistently delivering value, is not a real “team”, or has a bad relationship with their customers, I believe Scrum will always work. The team will always be better than it was before. Typically these teams have no process (even though they think they do), so anything that brings discipline and communication will allow the team to improve. I have never, ever seen this to not be the case. I admit that at times the improvement is small, but it is an improvement nonetheless. Of course one thing that’s crucial is to have a strong, experienced coach.

As far as the roles introduced by Scrum, you will have a hard time convincing me that there are times when a product owner role is not needed. I’d have to say that the #1 problem I see in “troubled” teams is the fact that they have no idea what to work on next. What do they do in this case? They start guessing. Oh, and they never really know when they are “Done”. If I do nothing else but involve a strong product owner, that alone typically propels the team forward.

As the team matures, however, they will inspect and adapt (the essence of Scrum). Many “advanced” teams may be considered by Scrum-ists to be doing “Scrum-but”, or maybe even not doing Scrum at all, since they have adapted to be the most productive and efficient they can be. Which helps verify that Scrum will not always work.

What do you think? Will Scrum ALWAYS work?