Don’t blame Scrum for helping you see

Today I completed a CSM course & Workshop in Charlotte.

I forgot to tell the attendees one thing.

One of the major purposes of Scrum is to enable the Team to see its problems better.  We hope that, being able to see the problems (impediments) better, the Team and the firm will take more action to fix the top one (well, over time, the top ones).

But it is painful to see some of the impediments.  In the former days, we could pretend that we were better than we (really) are.  And some of the problems seem so stupid, once you see them.

Some people want to blame Scrum for the problems.  That the Team is dysfunctional, or not really a Team.  That people won’t agree.  That we don’t have enough automated testing. That we have too much technical debt. That the product owner is not conveying very good requirements.  Whatever the key problems may be.

And these problems are often hard to fix. People are involved. They are stubborn.  It is trouble.

But they need to remember that it is easier to fix problems if you can see them.  And that Scrum did not cause the problems. Scrum, in fact, is helping you dig out of the problems, a little bit at a time.