Warning: This article is highly opinionated !
Spending the first few years in my career as an engineer, and wanting to break into project management and leadership. I started to prepare by taking online degrees in product management and ownership, agile, and scrum. When I got a team assigned to me, i started immediately to apply scrum, and harnessing some of its benefits, by putting my team into a timebox and ensuring that they continuously deliver every 2 weeks which was a very good measure to introduce order and maximise the team’s value, however, we fell into one of its traps by having a scrum master who wasted solid 30-45 mins every morning from the whole team in our supposed to be 15 mins daily standup.
One year later, new team and a new company, I grew much familiar with scrum and had a different situation by teaming up with a great scrum master. This time we I will finally do scrum right -that’s what I told myself- , our best highlight was that we always could deliver and demo to our stakeholders. We were very keen on continuously making something and shipping it out and that attitude put us in a very good position within our organisation. However, we still spent hours and hours of retros and backlog refinement, our team tried really hard to do scrum right, to timebox meetings, to prepare as much as we can. We tried many measures, but it always ended the same : A meeting with 7 – 10 people where you have mostly half of them engaged and the rest are just chilling, listening or maybe even sleeping in the background with their cameras off. It was pandemic time and online was the default.
In my next role, i started to reflect about the essence of agile, i was (and am still) lucky having a colleague who applied subconsciously all the agile principles as i understand them without sticking to any book or following any process.
We immediately matched together ! Let’s not follow any process ! Here is our playbook
- Short direct conversations using phone calls or chat messages : as short daily standup as possible, cancel all other regular ceremonies
- Working software over extensive documentation : we used a very loose process of defining teams tasks using formatted texts into our team channel, only created docs when the customer or the situation required it
- Respond very quickly and dynamically to change (principles 1 and 2 above will help in being lean enough to do that)
- Collaborate always very early with the customer and involve them in our steps ( and even some of the team channels)
Turns out to be that we are agile , and this is agile.
Now , don’t get me wrong, agile is good , agile is necessary unlike what my click-bait title may suggest, but please be careful about all the nonsense certificates , ceremonies and courses surrounding it. Call it scrum , SaFe, LeSS or whatever, based on my personal experience: it was mostly a waste of time multiplied by the number of the good engineers which I had in the team.
Your experience can be different but I advise you to think really hard next time about the cost vs benefit before bringing your best engineers into the weekly backlog refinement to label your tickets with story points.
Extra reading: https://www.svpg.com/process-police/
Ahmed's website 