Why Scrum may not help you with your projects and how to get the real benefit of it?

Scrum is used by every software development company around. Scrum is everywhere today – in job descriptions, articles, company presentations. Then someone tells you “Well, we are not using Scrum exactly as the books say, but our projects are developed under Scrum”.

Or they may claim proudly “We are using 100% real Scrum”. After a while, you meet the project manager and start noticing bosses walking around giving their direct orders, nervous people, tired developers, overtime.

Scrum certificates are offered around. A lot of them. For Scrum Masters, for Product Owners. You can get a certificate even for a Scrum developer. You see an industry. It is an industry. It is popular, and it makes a lot of money.

Why Scrum may not help you or even things can get worse?

A lot of people are confused today. Scrum is popular. Everyone is using it. But most of the projects have the same issues as before. People are not happier, the CEO is not happier. The gross margin is the same. The number of developers leaving their employers is the same.

The first thing all these people need to do is to understand these very simple things:

Scrum is not project management.

Scrum cannot help you with improving your processes inside the company and the development. Forget about this dream right now.

Scrum does not help you with some faster development processes or optimize the workload.

Some people believe that development time or cost in Scrum is less because in Scrum you have these “sprints” and all the work is done magically faster with optimal quality. False. In Scrum, you update the final product often in order to receive feedback from your users right now. Then you may re-work.

Scrum is about product management.

Scrum is not invented for projects. It is about products. Get the difference between those two things immediately.

Scrum is not Jira

A lot of people really believe if they are using Jira, they are using Scrum. Stop using your Jira right now until you realize that Jira is just a normal project management tool with some Agile terminology inside. Use a plastic board and paper for your user stories. Stop logging time for a while and focus on improvement and value.

Scrum is not a business tool. It is an ideology.

Scrum does not magically increase the profit of your product, a number of sales, performance, etc. If you develop your product obsessed with these ideas, nothing much will happen if you do not get all the ideas of Scrum.

Scrum is not a manufactory. It is a mindset and culture.

Usually, people wait for orders and they do what is expected from them with some acceptable result. “My team lead will tell me what to do”. Or “This is the responsibility of the project manager”. In Scrum, everyone is responsible. Everyone needs to have a sense of responsibility, optimization, performance, openness, transparency, equality.

Project Management Academy (PMA.bg) offers really comprehensive and advanced Scrum Master course where all details and differences are carefully explained.

Some final words

Do not use Scrum just because everyone does. Do they understand it? Do you understand it? Be sure you do. And be sure you need it, when and why.

If you develop your own product, Scrum may help you a lot. If a client of yours requires it, then use it. If they don’t want it, forget about it.

Read about the key ideas of Scrum, the history of Agile, what is Lean and MVP. If you find these topics interesting and challenging, great. If you don’t, forget about expecting some Scrum miracles.

Thank you for reading!

Anton Radev