Do You Hate Scrum And Wish to Abandon It? Here Are Some Tips for When You Do!
And this is equally applicable to Agile
And this is equally applicable to Agile
Do you recognize the following? For years and years, you were forced to work in Scrum Teams. You have come to hate it. When you think of Scrum, you envision the tedious Daily Scrums, the Sprint Reviews without stakeholders, and the Sprint Retrospectives that are about the same issues every time. You have come to despise the preachy Scrum Masters and bossy Product Owners. You see Scrum as a pest for software teams. And you share this with your colleagues. Scrum has failed you.
I understand. Scrum may not work for you. In fact, it should never be about the approach, about the framework. It should not be about Scrum. It should be about the impact you make, about creating valuable and successful products.
So, if you and your colleagues have so much trouble with Scrum, then look for other ways. There’s more than Scrum to achieve your goals. But I advise you to take the following into consideration when you do.
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Outcomes
Outcomes matter! Outputs are important as they help you achieve your outcomes, and make your impact. But it all starts with knowing the outcome you wish to achieve!
You create a product to make an impact. You may have assumptions about which new features will make the biggest impact. But you only know if you check if this is really the case. Don’t assume you will achieve your outcome by simply creating and deploying the things you consider most important. Verify this!
Change is normal
Things change along the way. You can fool yourself by thinking you know everything upfront. But this is almost always absurd. So make sure you have discussions with your users, customers and other stakeholders on what you plan to do, what you created and what you learned. And have your conversations on what you have learned in relation to the outcome. Not in relation to what you produced.
Work on the right things
When you acknowledge that changes in insights can occur, you need to ensure you are on top of creating the right things. This has some implications.
Firstly, you need to be able to verify that what you build is indeed what your users, customers and other stakeholders want. As you can only do this by showing a working product, you need to have people with different skill sets in a team. Only this way are you able to build increments of your product quickly enough to have a valuable discussion with your stakeholders.
Secondly, you need to be able to change priorities and deviate from earlier plans or ideas on what to do next. When things can change quickly, you should be able to respond quickly and replan quickly.
Break the silos
As soon as you realise you need to embrace change, you also have to find other ways to organize your work. You need to break the silos.
You need to have teams that are cross-functional to build a working increment of the product. But you also need to collaborate with users, customers and other stakeholders to remain on track with the outcome. You need to work together to achieve the desired impact.
Understand the impact of trust
When you accept that changes are inevitable, you also will have to accept that things won’t go as expected, as planned. In traditional environments, deviations from a pre-established plan are often considered to be a sign of something wrong. Either the planning was done poorly or the people doing the work didn’t do what they promised to do.
But this isn’t true when you are in an environment of change. On the contrary, you wish to be on top of things and learn from reality quickly. This calls for an environment of trust. An environment where unexpected, even negative news is embraced as vital information to understand what not to do and what to try instead.
This environment of trust isn’t a given. Especially in organizations that are rooted in a traditional approach to creating products, many will be reluctant to share “bad news”. Still, this trust is essential.
Focus
In a changing environment, it may be difficult to understand what to work on. Plans will change, so you can’t rely on them to understand what to do. But still, the focus is important.
The focus, though, shifts from output to outcome. Instead of focusing on what should be built, you can focus on what you wish to achieve. You can set goals to have that focus. These goals can be short-term, but also longer-term.
Goals help you to have a long-term view in a volatile environment. They bring focus.
Speedy decision-making — at the team level
Another consequence of not knowing what will happen is that decision-making on what to do next should be brought to the team. Because if you don’t do this, the response to change will be too slow.
This means that as soon as something new is learned, the teams will decide what to do next to best achieve their goals. This also implies that these kinds of skills, understanding what brings value and helps to achieve the goal, should be at the team level too.
Regular reflection
In an ever-changing environment, it may be impossible to always know how to best work as a team, with your stakeholders. It may be a good idea to reflect on the way you work as a team and try to improve this.
As with regular reflection on what you need to do, you may also want to have a regular reflection on how to do things, and how to collaborate.
Beyond Scrum…
Scrum isn’t the be-all-end-all of ways to create valuable products. I know many people who are disappointed by it and want to move on. If you are in this position, then I suggest you experiment with looking for different ways that may suit your situation better.
I hope that the pointers I gave help you to make informed decisions when you do. Because no matter how you look at it, many environments are prone to constant changes.
And in these environments, a traditional approach to creating products — with long-term plans that ideally don’t change — will not work. The outcome is a better measure of success than output, although you need to create output to achieve your outcome. And responding to new insights is vital. As is an environment of trust, the capacity to focus, break silos and promote collaboration. Lastly, decision power is best placed at the team level which reflects regularly how they can improve their collaboration.
I hope this was a useful read for you. And good luck with your journey to finding better ways!