Another article on “how I missed the point and came to completely the wrong conclusion”. I remember, what was before scrum and Agile. It was chaos sometimes ruled by a lousy waterfall and other times by nothing. People were doing their tasks mostly in isolation tasked by PM. It was not unusual that somebody was finetuning the color of the button. Four days later it was probably optimal blue, however, the price tag of €2000 of this action in a project for €10000 was indeed a problem. Such things happened frequently and projects went fine up to 90% of the budget spent, then suddenly it all failed. Most of the projects failed, they burned money or delivered what was not needed.

Scrum and agile techniques were introduced to radically improve the economy of the projects. Developers become extremely expensive, therefore pressure on performance. Scrum quickly shows problems, it is its main benefit. Mostly, we do not have teams, we have groups of individuals unable to work in a team (btw this pattern is visible in this article, too). We often see a lack of knowledge, where developers miss the broad skills - beyond development they need to know testing, team collaboration, self-organization, analysis, basics of project management, understanding of the domain, algorithmization, knowledge of building of SW systems, … I just named few which I see often in organizations. If the doctors had the comparable knowledge most developers have now, it would be very scary to visit the hospital. Scrum shows all this, and then either org starts doing something about it or ignores it. If the latter, the result is exactly what is described in the article. It takes time to create a working organization under agile. It is not about the team only. Performance is achieved by focusing on activities with the highest economical gain. Just remember, when was the last time you discussed € with your team in planning? Never? There lies your failure’s root cause.