Sunday, August 25, 2013

When would I not want to do Scrum?

This is a slight variant on the question I asked before.

I wanted to add a few things that I did not say before.  You still might want to do a project despite some of the things I will mention, but I have gotten impatient as I have gotten older.

1. High priority. I want the work to be meaningful to the organization and/or the customers. And for the organization to be committed to it.
Seldom to I see a Team get work that has a very low priority.  But I do see lots of situations where the importance is not compelling enough compared to other things. And I see lots of organizations who
have not gotten the message about 'focus, prioritize, get the top thing done first'.

2. Want to do Scrum. I want 'the right people' to be generally willing to at least try Scrum. And some general willingness by the organization to fix the biggest impediments.
To start, a  willingness to 'give it a try' is good enough.  But I would also be looking for indicators that we can convince them to become truly positive as they start to see it in real life.

3. A real stable Team. To me, if the organization will not give us a real stable Team, things are highly suspect.  I am concerned they are not decided about their priorities. Or they are not decisive. I suppose I could understand certain real-life constraints, but too often I have seen what I have considered ... it just did not make sense to me.  The managers still had not understood how powerful the Team is; they were still too stuck in trying to optimize the so-called 'efficiency' of the skill sets.

As I suggested, in specific situations I might agree that the Team is as real and as stable as we can get.

So, if I did not get some fairly positive feelings in all 3 of those areas, I might not want to do Scrum. 
But I probably wouldn't want to do the work any other way, either.

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