Scrum Guide is Stronger with Agile Communication: Agile is Alive

Lately, LinkedIn has been buzzing with posts on “Is Agile Dead?”, “Agile is Alive,” “Success and Failures of Scrum,” and more, from experts around the world. These discussions offer valuable insights, but I’d like to invite you to look at it from a different angle: Scrum and Agile principles combined with effective communication.

After nearly 12 years working in Agile Communication in digital product management and using various Agile methodologies, especially Scrum, I’ve noticed something. A lot of the frustration with Agile and Scrum stems from one key issue: unstructured and unstandardized communication between Product Owners and Development Teams, as well as between Scrum Masters and their teams.

Both the Agile Manifesto and the Scrum Guide prioritize good communication, but they don’t really cover HOW to manage it effectively. And in real digital product development projects, this leaves a lot of room for misunderstandings.

In real digital product development projects, many questions come up about translating between unstructured business language and structured technical language.

Unstructured business language is used in the business world for things like business strategy, sales approach, segmentation, financial analysis, production line, key partners, business model, customer relations, and more.

Structured technical language is used in the tech world by development teams everywhere. This includes tools like entity diagrams, class diagrams, form elements, architecture diagrams, database structures, UI pages, UI forms, and so on.

?These two worlds rarely overlap smoothly. Development teams often expect Product Owners to translate business needs into something more technical, but without a standard way to do this, it becomes a major struggle. Developers typically don’t have much interest in understanding business terms, and while adding a business analyst can help, their impact is hit-or-miss depending on their skills.

?As mentioned in the Scrum Guide, even though developers are self-organized, they usually don’t make an effort to understand business language. This often leads to a COMMUNICATION WAR between the product owner and development team. When this happens, none of the Scrum values, events, or artifacts work effectively in digital product management

?The Scrum Master has little role or impact in helping the business and development teams resolve the Communication War and improve performance. Teams that manage to solve these communication issues are more likely to support the Scrum Guide and Agile. Those that don’t tend to struggle with Agile, and it appears that most teams haven’t been able to fully overcome this Communication War.

What about me?

I've implemented most Agile methodologies and, through my experience with Agile Communication, I've found a way to solve the Communication War between business and development teams. This makes the Scrum Guide, along with other Agile methods, fully effective for me.

In my view, AGILE IS ALIVE and will stay alive if the communication barrier is resolved. Without addressing this, Agile simply won’t work

More details on the success of the Scrum Guide with Agile Communication will be shared in upcoming articles

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