A Daily Stand Up Does Not A Scrum Make

After working on the transformation to an Agile way of working for almost one year now, I was so excited, people were taking ownership over their work, stepping up to commit to a Sprint Goal, communicating and making changes to processes and tools regularly - the perfect Agile Champions. This began in one department of the business and was slowly getting expanded out across the whole business.

Then someone from a different department came over to me in the morning.

“Hey, we’re working in Scrum, can you come in and have a look and can we have a Scrum Master?”

Wait a second, something in that sentence certainly doesn’t match up.

So, I went and observed this team in their ‘Daily Stand Up’.

It has to be said, that in terms of team communication, they were up there, asking each other the right questions and getting answers from each other to said questions. Brilliant!

However… this meeting lasted 30 minutes, the questions and tasks weren’t spoken about in terms of an overall Sprint Goal, what were they aiming for? Were these questions/discussions therefore relevant?

I had to find out more.

After this meeting, I caught up with the team and just asked them some questions. Most importantly, “Why do you want to work in Scrum?”

“Because this other department does”.

This response immediately reminded me of my mum, and the classic line of “If your friends wanted to jump off a cliff, would you do it too?”

I’m not saying this team wasn’t compatible with Scrum, simply that if the reason for wanting to do was to mimic everyone else, it probably wouldn’t succeed. There is a level of commitment to the framework, and perhaps more importantly, the mindset, that isn’t taken into consideration.

Understandable when Agile and Scrum is often presented simply as do more with less.

After asking a few more questions, about the nature of their work, how long they think they’d be able to plan for, how many external dependencies exist, etc. I suggested that they use a different Agile technique of Kanban, allowing for continuous cycles of work whilst keeping the space to review and re-evaluate every iteration.

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s that the Agile mindset, of being open to change, and responding to your environment and opportunities is equally, if not more important than carrying out the Scrum events themselves.

That said, providing the structure and framework that allows for this level of openness, when done correctly, is invaluable, and this shows when we look at the uptake of Agile working across the world.

How often have you seen someone claiming to be working in an Agile way, and how often has this been a purely superficial methodology?