TL;DR
I am an engineer and have been practicing Agile for several years now. And I do not despise Agile. My company has been successful in sustaining a multi-tiered Enterprise Agile environment.
Trying to be supportive and do good, is most of the time an honorable thing. This is particularly true in your capacity as a Scrum master. However, doing too much good can quickly have the opposite effect. It’s a known Scrum anti-pattern, often referred to as the Scrum mom syndrome.
Read on to learn more about its manifestations, and the damage to your team caused by being overly protective.
Disclaimer: Of course, this post is in no way intended to be gender-specific. In my experience, there is no difference between the Scrum pop and the Scrum mom. This post is all about the emerging trend of Scrum helicopter parenting.
The agile consulting industry repackages an originally human-centered, technology-driven philosophy into a standardized, all-weather project-risk mitigating methodology. Sold to command & control organizations, their middle managers turn “Agile” into a 21. century adoption of Taylorism for knowledge workers. Beyond this meta-level, the reasons, why engineers despise Agile, fall into five categories: Control, manipulation, monitoring, technology and teamwork.
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Customer care as an entity, its function, and status within a company, can act as a good litmus test for a company’s culture, its product management, and thus its potential for innovation and agile change.
If customer care is regarded solely as a cost center that needs to be outsourced, agile change is unlikely to happen in that organization.