Well it was an interesting week last week so this week I thought I’d start out with something lighter.
Some nice Scrum Humor from the UK!
A poster on Slashdot (/.) had written:
At my company, our mis-implementation of Agile includes the employment of some of our most highly-paid, principal engineers as ScrumMasters. This has effectively resulted in a loss of those engineering functions as these engineers now dedicate their time to ScrumMastery. Furthermore, the ScrumMasters either cannot or do not separate their roles as Team Leads with those of ScrumMastery and — worse — seem to be completely unaware that this poor implementation of Agile development is harmful to our velocity.
And some of the humorous follow-ups:
It’s like Dungeons and Dragons. Follow the rules too rigidly and you’re so busy rolling dice that nobody has any fun.
Could we please get some explanatory links in here? This reads like a mix between a corporate nightmare (“harmful to our velocity”? SERIOUSLY?) and the rantings of an MMORPG nerd (“I was a level 72 ScrumMaster specced for Agility, but then they nerfed that and our Team Leads couldn’t afford the new +5 leadership crafts, so we completely tanked at the Waterfalls of Development, even though we hired N00Bs as cannon fodder!”).
See lots of SCRUM – full of Agile zealots who blame the rest of the business for not doing it the (fr)agile way when the zealots are fresh out of uni and know it all? Another acronym for agile is DAFT – design after first testing, or CR*P constant refactoring after programming.
Ahh, the ol’ “It didn’t work for you because *you* didn’t understand it” argument. The same one trotted out by every snakeoil salesman, con-man, religious leader, and self-proclaimed expert since the dawn of time…
Excellent post. From my experience as well, snake oil is a great description.
Here’s one easy test for snake oil business/engineering practices: can the concept be described just as easily with normal, everyday vocabulary as the ridiculous technobabble, buzzwords, and metaphors commonly used? If yes, then there is a good chance it is a methodology created for its own sake (and as you said, the sake of the consultants).
Example: “the x-rays show a wedge compression fracture of the C7 vertebrae” is a bit more helpful to a doctor than “looks like he broke his back!” Not snake oil. “Moving the team leader to scrum master is harmful to our velocity” – translation: “making our most experienced programmer a project manager is slowing us down” – yep, snake oil detector going off!
I like the one on Scrum Masters as my organization had the same issue. Good engineers were asked to become Scrum Masters. They did a great job, but at the same time we lost some of the best engineering talents on producing products.
We’re adjusting and shifting, but a tough thing to strike a good balance for sure.
What is it that these Scrum Masters are spending their time on? One shouldn’t think that being a SM should be that time consuming. Also it might be a good reason to ditch Scrum and spend some time in a different methodology. Certainly I point out in my “Scrum as the new Command and Control” that forcing the management overhead down onto the team is a manifestly unwise idea…
Jordan
That was what I initially thought that the SM “activities” should not be that time consuming. However, we got Scrum training and the trainer was saying that SM is a full time job. The SM is there to serve the team, dig up all the hidden dirty secrets within the team that impacts productivity, drive changes on individual and team level to make the team as productive as possible, etc. Just the amount of work there makes it a full time job.
Now, I don’t agree with some of that since they bleed into the role of managers. Sounds like it should be more like a partnership between the SM and manager to solve personnel issues and drive team changes, but that still takes a considerable amount of time off the SM.
I think the SM role will not be time consuming IF the team is already at a high-performing level where the team self-regulates, all team members buy into continuous improvements and already unconsciously sharing the things the SM needs to do initially.
I’m not a scrum believer (obviously) but I’ve never seen it stated that a Scrum Master is a full time job. Who is your trainer that said it was and what does the SM spend their “full time” doing?
Jordan
The trainer was Lee Henson: http://blog.agiledad.com/
The full time Scrum Mastering job includes working with the team to identify and remove roadblocks, facilitate with coordinating work among team members and other teams, work with team on metrics, etc. and find ways to push team to high performing, work with each team member to understand strength/weakness and help improve individual performance, etc. As I mentioned before, I think these bleed into management’s job. But otherwise, that’s still a lot of work.
OK. Well it does seem like a lot. If you are early into your agile adoption maybe it is taking a long time to “remove impediments”…. But I would agree that sounds more like management type of job….
Jordan
Exactly – a decent Project Manager would do exactly that and leave the Development Team to manage their workflow internally however they wished as long as the work was progressing to hit the deadline agreed.
Scrum also has this really annoying idea that you can start a job with a half-assed set of requiremetns and jsut keep tinkering to you reach some sort of Escape Velocity at which point a product flies out and everyone is happy. The harsh reality is that your company is aked to produce X for Y budget in Z time. The Project Managers then mitigate the commercial exposure, ensure as much information is gathered to brief the teams on and balance the work being done against the requested changes, budget, shiftign deadlines, etc. Being a Project Manager *is* a full-time job, being a Scrum Master doesn’t touch on half of that role, though, so it is (in my mind, at least) redundant, other than to spread the evangelism so that the money keeps coming in for the Scrum consultants.
Long ago, I earned a degree in Chemistry, which is pretty rooted in the Scientific method – propose a hypothesis, test that hypothesis against a control set to get measurable data and then either prove or disprove the hypothesis. Scrum seems to work on the basis of:
1. Create hypothesis
2. only test on subjects you know will prove your theory
3. Notice that anyone repeating the experiment sees a 75% non-correlation with your theory
4. claim the hypothesis is true and that the rest of the world is “doing it wrong”.
It’s about as dilligent as those two Italian scientists who claimed to have created Cold Fusion and then disappeared when no-one else could repeat the experiment, except that the Scrum proponents use blind faith to deny the existence of the obvious flaws, in the same way that Creationists try to argue against Dinosaurs existing 100+Million years ago as the world can only be 6,500 years old at most, yet there is no mention of giant lizards in the Bible anywhere.
No, waterfall isn’t perfect, but the problem is more about people working on projects where things aren’t adapted and updated to reflect the changes, so that the method got a bad name, when all it was ever really saying was “find out what you are being asked to do, make sure you deliver what is asked for and regularly check that you’re on time/on budget and flag issues if this is not the case”. The rest is all extraneous.
Call me a heretic, but I really long for the fall of the Church of Scrum
Classic!
Jordan
Sorry for the typos in the previous reply, but it was typed on my phone!
I always find it amusing to bait the True Believers, as I have worked everywhere from billion-pound blue chip corporations, to small-scale media agencies, to engineering consultancies and I have never found a single place of work that meets the perfect conditions required to implement Scrum. I find it especially odd that, having taken the sensible bits of Agile/Scrum, Prince2 and PMBOK and created bespoke processes for them, they have improved how they worked and made things more profitable. Maybe I should start a cult of my own?!