8 Surprising Ways You Make Scrum Fail

Although there are many Agile development methodologies, but Scrum is definitely the most mentioned one by developers. You may have heard about extreme programming, feature-driven development, and others – but today Scrum is likely to be ‘the new black’, and there are countless sources spreading wisdom to Scrum devotees.

Having so much information on hand, it’s easy to get lost in Scrum jungles. Here is a list of things you might be doing wrong that constantly make Scrum fail.

#1. Scrum = sprints

You don’t really care what Scrum means and believe it equals ‘working in sprints’.

#2. Value = money

Many Scrum practitioners mistakenly believe that ‘value’ is about money. Or the number of story points delivered by the team during sprints. And that’s it.

#3. You have no idea why your company is going Agile

It simply doesn’t matter to you  – you accept it as a matter of course because Agile/Scrum is “the new black” and this is what all other companies do.

#4. You ignore the best Agile/Scrum practices

You continue to ignore Agile/Scrum gurus and practices that they highly recommend because you believe their experience can’t be applied to your company as your business is highly unique.

#5. Planning everything in advance and blindly following your plan

After all, who cares about dividing the backlog properly, seeing if it works and then improving it along the way? Just plan everything in advance and don’t even try to change anything.

#6. Failing to pick a transforming leader for your company

When it comes to choosing a leader, many companies simply pick the eldest board member who, as they believe, would do things right – just the way he did many decades/years before. But if nothing has changed then, why would it change now?

#7. Choosing the wrong Scrum Master

To choose the wrong Scrum Master follow two simple steps: first, find a team member who was due for promotion for many years (even if s/he has no leadership qualities at all). Then send this person for a two-day long Scrum Master courses and don’t do anything else.

#8. Letting the higher management ‘help’ your Scrum team

First, you can send all your executives to a Scrum master course so that they actually have some idea how it all works – and then let them ‘help’ your team. Who knows, maybe they’ll teach you how to make a better retrospective.