Tue 17 Apr 2007
I was talking with someone about Scrum and other methodologies the other day and he said something like this: “all methodologies are like cookbooks, you don’t use all the recipies – in fact implementing them to the letter is not good, you should skip some parts“. It then dawned on me – and I quickly pointed it out – that Scrum is so simple there is hardly anything to skip.
If you look at the hard, “methodology-ish” bits then Scrum is just three roles (Team, Product Owner, Scrum Master), three meetings (Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review) and three lists to maintain (Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog – with tasks and burndown chart – and Impediments). Not much to throw out – and nothing that would make any sense to.
I can, however, very much understand that people with experience in traditional project management approach are wary of implementing a methodology in full. PMBOK has a few hundred pages, RUP is so complex just understanding it takes ages and Prince-2 smells of centuries-old british bureacracy it was created for. All call for complex documentation and processes, all assume static models and formalized communication.
Indeed, the burden they call for can almost kill all the productivity in an organization. No wonder people learned the hard way that it is better not to follow everything those heavy books prescribed.
April 19th, 2007 at 3:50
Andy–This is very well said. Scrum is pretty much the bare minimum that a team needs to have in place to work well. There are many good things that can be added but they are largely context-specific. For example, if a team is coordinating work with other teams it can do a “Scrum of Scrums” meeting. I think one of the reasons for the popularity of Scrum is that it is a barebones starting point. Teams do, however, need to make Scrum their own over time by inventing the things they need to really help them take it up even a further notch–many teams, for example, “invent” the XP practices by discovering they would be useful and then add them to Scrum.