Scrum requires the full organisation to commit
I got myself scrum certified.
Getting the certificate is easy, it's enjoyable - it's very useful, and most importantly, it doesn’t actually help you very much.
As many of us know, an organisation can be anything from super rigid to flexible and all shades in between. You can have people with various backgrounds and predispositions.
You might be taking on Scrum because you have an organisational requirement to do so, or you may be finding yourself lost in projects or maybe doing it to pre-emptively to prepare for growth.
It is truly a jungle of things and if my experience is anything to go by, people’s motivation and the management hold all the keys to actually making it work.
If you have a combination of these factors, you will find yourself struggling to teamwork properly:
If you do not have work that can be planned for two weeks ahead.
If the team has no external direction and/or the Product Owner does not put effort into the backlog.
No matter what management thinks, if you clearly have a group of people rather than a team of people (distinction is that more than one person works on the same thing in a team).
Team members are not fine with going out of their comfort zone.
Team members work on stuff alone.
One or more of the following management disasters is what you’re under:
Management had no clear vision on what the team is going to do.
Your team has more projects to manage than you have toes and fingers.
Every team in the organisation is essentially competing for projects.
Your team has to function as a support team and a development team in the snap of a finger.
Most of the team’s work is support work, and the management still views it as a development team.
Scrum was imposed on the team because of organisation guidelines.
Bottom-line is that Scrum can help a team in a lot of ways, but for it to work, the whole organisation needs to commit to it including stakeholders, and you need to find intrinsically motivated open minded people.
There is a lot of scenarios where it won’t work or where it becomes more overhead than it’s worth. These scenarios, if my work experience can be any precursor, are easily the majority. Regardless, it is important to get real about the situation you’re in, and accept the fact that Scrum might, sometimes not work for your scenario – and that is fine.
Do not let management tell you otherwise.