My only requirement for team processes is that they be mostly up to the team. Absolutely some type of structure is needed. If something isn’t working for the team, they need to have agency to address that, whether it means adding, removing, or changing something.
Scrum Teams are cross-functional, meaning the members have all the skills necessary to create value each Sprint. They are also self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how.
That’s not a throwaway sentence - it is fundamental to how scrum works and that is reinforced throughout the scrum guide.
Every conversation about Agile and/or Scrum being “the worst”, after some prodding it turns out that their company has refused to read or implement one or several of the fundamental principles, often without even being aware that was an essential requirement. You’re baking a cake and you decided to not use any butter, that’s on you champ, don’t blame the fucking recipe.
The biggest valid criticism of scrum is that the thing that makes it so great - its structural empowerment of individual teams - is also what makes it structurally incompatible with any traditional top-down management style. The company must fundamentally be (re-)organized to have a flat corporate structure within its R&D department - most are simply incapable of mustering the necessary changes, if only because too many middle managers’ jobs are at stake. So they call their middle managers “POs” or “Scrum Masters” and wonder why their version of Scrum sucks.
I reached for the up button about five times reading this. I absolutely 100% agree. Agile, and all of it’s little branches, were created by self managing teams. Each team did it differently so named what they were doing differently, we got XP, scrum, kanban, etc. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t the specific flavour that led to success, it was the diverse, empowered, self managing team of mature, talented people. Get yourself a team like that and the rest will care of itself.
My only requirement for team processes is that they be mostly up to the team. Absolutely some type of structure is needed. If something isn’t working for the team, they need to have agency to address that, whether it means adding, removing, or changing something.
My favorite approach to team processes was to work entirely alone and do everything by myself.
I can get behind that sentiment.
a true team player. prob mvp too.
Well, yeah, that’s what Scrum is. From the guide which takes maybe 10 minutes to read
That’s not a throwaway sentence - it is fundamental to how scrum works and that is reinforced throughout the scrum guide.
Every conversation about Agile and/or Scrum being “the worst”, after some prodding it turns out that their company has refused to read or implement one or several of the fundamental principles, often without even being aware that was an essential requirement. You’re baking a cake and you decided to not use any butter, that’s on you champ, don’t blame the fucking recipe.
The biggest valid criticism of scrum is that the thing that makes it so great - its structural empowerment of individual teams - is also what makes it structurally incompatible with any traditional top-down management style. The company must fundamentally be (re-)organized to have a flat corporate structure within its R&D department - most are simply incapable of mustering the necessary changes, if only because too many middle managers’ jobs are at stake. So they call their middle managers “POs” or “Scrum Masters” and wonder why their version of Scrum sucks.
I reached for the up button about five times reading this. I absolutely 100% agree. Agile, and all of it’s little branches, were created by self managing teams. Each team did it differently so named what they were doing differently, we got XP, scrum, kanban, etc. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t the specific flavour that led to success, it was the diverse, empowered, self managing team of mature, talented people. Get yourself a team like that and the rest will care of itself.
The companies I worked for just kept doing shit the same way they always had but renamed everything with terms borrowed from agile.
As a PO I resemble this remark.
This is what’s most important. Allow for experimentation!
What works well for one team might not work well for your team. What worked well for your team 1 year ago might no longer be what you need now.