TL; DR: Lipstick Agile — Happiness in the Trenches?
Have you noticed how many people in the agile field are unhappy with their work situation? A situation where an organization already struggles doing agile, not to mention ‘becoming agile?’ This is what I call lipstick Agile.
Scrum Masters and agile coaches are close to either burnout or indifference. Product Owners who “own” the product by name only, and developers questioning why “Agile” is imposed upon them and often turns out to be just another form of micromanagement.
TL; DR: Scrum’s Nature: It Is a Tool; It Is Not About Love or Hate
Regularly, we find articles from developers detailing why ‘Agile’ in general and Scrum’s nature, in particular, deserve our collective disdain.
What has always struck me in this discussion is its emotionality. Scrum is a tool, useful to accomplish one primary task: delivering value to customers of emergent products in complex environments while mitigating an organization’s exposure to risk at the same time. So, if Scrum is not working in an organization, maybe it is because Scrum is applied to the wrong cause in the first place. Or, that its application has been mechanical, driven by folks who don’t know what they are doing. (Seriously, how hard can Scrum be if the manual comprises of 18 pages, right?)
The question then is: Why would I “hate” a tool unsuited for the intended purpose or applied incompetently? Would I hate a hammer for not being capable of accurately driving a screw into a wooden beam? Probably not, as the hammer wasn’t designed for that purpose, and neither sheer will-power nor stamping with your feet will change the fact.
TL; DR: A Remote Daily Scrum with a Distributed Team
We started this series on remote agile with looking into practices and tools; we explored virtual Liberating Structures, and how to master Zoom. We had a look at common remote agile anti-patterns; we analyzed remote Retrospectives, Sprint Plannings as well as remote Sprint Reviews based on Liberating Structures. This eighth article now looks into supporting a distributed Development Team organizing a remote Daily Scrum.
TL; DR: A Remote Sprint Review with a Distributed Team
We started this series on remote agile with looking into practices and tools; we explored virtual Liberating Structures, and how to master Zoom. We had a look at common remote agile anti-patterns, and we analyzed remote Retrospectives and Sprint Plannings based on Liberating Structures. This seventh article now looks into organizing a remote Sprint Review with a distributed team: How to practice the review with virtual Liberating Structures, including and giving a voice to team members, stakeholders, and customers.
After covering the Scrum Master and the Product Owner, this article addresses Development Team anti-patterns, covering all Scrum Events as well as the Product Backlog artifact. Learn more about what to look out for if you want to support your fellow teammates.
Learn how individual incentives and outdated organizational structures — fostering personal agendas and local optimization efforts — manifest themselves in Scrum stakeholder anti-patterns which easily can impede any agile transition.
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