Scrum is garbage | Daily #227

The more and more I see the SCRUM method being used at different companies, the more I believe is utter garbage.

There is never consistency behind it. Each team or company has a process that LOOKS like SCRUM but is never actually the method itself. Some, for example, have the planning meetings, but never the retrospectives, or the opposite. Some use planning poker, but others don’t. Some use story points based on priority, others on complexity, or both.

Do you see where I’m going? There is NEVER a consistency in this pattern across companies or even teams and individuals.

What should a good system be?

My definition of a good project management system is that it automatically creates a consistent productive output of the workers without them knowing.

I see it in the way where a system is implemented on how a sports team like Basketball and Football plays. There is always a system in place on how to perform consistently game to game with the team. Once the system is in place and works, the players don’t notice that they are in the system at all.

We see this often where a ‘star’ player leaves a team and joins another, but never has the impact they had in the previous team. Most of the time it’s because the previous system allowed the athlete to be more impactful. The new one doesn't get the best out of this athlete. But the player usually doesn't realize this because that’s how it's supposed to be. They play their positions and do their job and the overall system will generate them more points.

That’s not what SCRUM does. All the players (workers) have to adjust themselves constantly to the system. They have to interrupt their work lots of times due to meetings, discussions, 1-on-1s, dependencies, alignments, demos, or whatever meetings there are.

30%~ of the sprint these workers need to adjust themselves to comply with the process. Why? More often than not literally just to comply with the process. People often say it's to benefit the Project Managers and maybe it is, but why does there need to be a project manager at all. Why does this person need to manage a system? Shouldn't the system automatically already work? Worse than that it sometimes even needs a ScRuM mAStER. Why? Wasn't SCRUM the perfect method?

That 30% of the wasted time could be an additional issue resolved, progress in a paper, another customer helped, or investment secured. But you have to comply with the system cause it 'WoRks'

I mean why do you think these meetings can be skipped by some and after a day or two nobody cares? Because it was never productive, to begin with.

The agileness of SCRUM also can get a bit ridiculous in which it creates many short-term decisions, which I don’t like at all. Often tickets/features/issues are made to be ‘implementable’ in one sprint. But NEVER take into account what comes next. How can you ever create something that anticipates what comes after? Why do you there is always questions during a sprint about the future?

The more I think about SCRUM, the more garbage the method I think is.