Nice article Martin.

I often see these things and many more in the organizations, and reading through remind me many of them. I like your note on Creativity. Indeed, “ it does not do very well when it is forced. Creativity is very much spontaneous, unique to the individual…”. This is often problem, when Scrum is deployed instead of Project Management technique. All work is in fact waterfall, but daily stand-ups “makes” project “agile”. Analysts creates requirements upfront, and there is no contact of developers with customer and his problem, and no validation of customer feedback after the sprint. In a good Scrum we also often forget, that space for creativity should be created and left open, even for spontaneous creativity, and work boundaries should be set accordingly. I have to double check, if we still have it and if we use it right.

There are many misconceptions in the Scrum as you describe it. Many people corrected them below in Responses. What I am helping people in teams to understand at my projects is that Scrum is their process and they can design it to fit their specific situation. Similarly to code ownership, it is possible to introduce architecture ownership, and its transparent display and regular validation. It is also possible to create conceptual plan for dealing with technical debth, because this is not an issue of Product Owner at all. It is also possible to include space for investigation of new technologies or approaches into the backlog, similarly as we deal with risks.

But most important is to enable for common understanding of big picture. Its not about what Product Owners wants, but about being in the shoes of the customer/user for a while, experiencing his pain and understand its motivation and expectations first hand without being filtered.

Sadly, most Scrum Masters have no practical experience with organization of work, many are untrained, there is no budget for training nor consultant, so one can observe patterns as you have described in the article. Results of rebranded waterfall.