Australian Scrum Community

“One of the great things about SCRUM is that it gets all of the news visible, whether it’s good or bad”

In this video Ken Scwaber @ google, in The Enterprise and Scrum, in just about any agile blog/book you’ll read the author will let you know that when using scrum (agile) to deliver your project you will receive news, and you receive it early. Before you start your project you’ll think “That’s great! I want to know what’s going on, if scrum can do that, I want it.”

Receiving this news early can be dramatic cultural shift for an organisation – maybe even a tectonic one. With a long project (> 6 months) using SDLC/Waterfall you find out something is a little late or off whack and you adjust your Gantt chart and voila you are tracking beautifully to schedule, then at the end pow you’re late, and no one knows why/where/what happened. There have been so many little adjustments, buried in one abstract document you can’t pick anyone that caused the problem, if you can remember any.

“If you use SCRUM you will know what sort of deep trouble you’re in right after one month.”

So you adopt SCRUM and after one sprint there it is in your face, nothing is done¹ . What do you do?

You could:

• Work faster (ie longer hours)
• Add more people (can you afford that?)
• Drop some scope (what will the customers think?)
• Change the date (can you afford this?)

These may allow you to deliver on time, but you haven’t fixed the problem. This is why you don’t want to use SCRUM. You can’t hide your problems anymore.

As a scrum master the problems will come up at the daily scrum and the sprint retrospective. So they must be dealt with, you can no longer hide the problems by shifting bars on a Gantt chart and you can’t use work arounds as these don’t solve the problem. Your teams expects you to remove the impedements.

As a product owner the scrum master will start bothering you with problems that they don’t have the authority to remove. These are impediments that are stopping you backlog being worked on, value is not being created, so you need to deal with these.

As an organisation/company/other you have rapidly exposed any problem you have lived with and now it has to be dealt with.

So you probably don’t want to use scrum. It’s too hard, and exposes too much.

¹ As in completed and ready for release.