When Scrum doesn't help?

"Technology is best when it brings people together." – Matt Mullenweg

Transcript:

Many business frameworks, famous or not, promise to tame business chaos and increase performance. Scrum, Lean, Agile, Kanban, EOS, and others are the most popular.

They all provide common sense recommendations and action templates to help implementations across organizations. Yet there is no shortage of people complaining about poor or even no results, and organizations officially abandon the practice.

Are there any early signs that can be used to indicate the success of the implementation? Or even a heed for implementation?

One crucial point often forgotten is that business framework (scrum) activities do not generate any value and do not help deliver products faster. The main target is to structure or formalize the process and make it more predictable.

In other words, It is a necessary overhead.

When does it make sense to take on the overhead?

When the team is losing too much energy because of a lack of coordination. Essentially, when there is too much shooting in all directions.

A good example is a start-up team, which is small at the beginning but where everyone does everything and is hyped and enthusiastic.

As the team grows, there are more and more signs of uncoordinated efforts - some activities overlap, even override, and some are forgotten.

That's the time to formalize and structure the process, introducing bureaucracy to minimize energy loss.

Essentially, we indirectly impact the product's timeline by minimizing the energy loss.

On the other hand, when the team's energy is low, adding any formality will not make any positive changes, leaving even less energy for value creation (projects, products, operations).

So, in summary, raise the team's energy first if necessary and then apply formality to coordinate efforts better.

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