Don't do Scrum

As a Scrum Trainer, I find myself getting more and more often telling my students not to use Scrum, they are paying money to learn Scrum and I am telling them not to use it. Here are three major reasons:

If your work is not complex

Scrum is designed for complex work or problems, if you are working on simple, complicated areas (refer to the graph above), there’s not much benefit of using Scrum, and it makes things worse, for example, one of my students comes from a civil engineering/construction background ( I still have no idea why she attended my training), we also discussed after the training. Her work and most of the construction-related work are not suitable for Scrum, except maybe more related to the digital areas. As if we are building a bridge, it is very likely we would turn that into a shopping mall, and the technology is not there yet, once we build a foundation, it becomes very expensive, or even impossible to change. To recap a bit, only if your work is complex, there’s a lot of unknown, then it’s suitable for Scrum. 

Management is control-freak

If there’s no trust with Management and they love micro-managing, they have no intention to change, Scrum is going to make things worse, managing is going to “weaponize” Scrum, join every daily Scrum and make it a status report for 1 hour, checking your progress daily, and always chase for “story points” (even though it’s not part of Scrum and it’s the point of Scrum), and very likely the teams would be forced to work overtime, and burnout the team for more output, don't put yourself into that miserable position!

If the company don't care about customers/employees

A lot of banks/insurance and other companies claim themselves to be customer-centric, but it’s rarely the case, they may have a fancy title and initiatives here and there, but most of them don't take it seriously. Change can be slow and painful, and it’s about putting money and effort into what customers want instead of just what the managers want. It’s a lot of hard work and requires a lot of courage, but if the company doesn't care about the customer and just uses Scrum, it’s very likely the company would just chase after “output”, more features, more points without talking to end-users. Similarly, if the company cares about employees,  their well-being and opinions, it does not matter what kind of company it is. If your company cares about customers and employees, you would probably get some benefit from Scrum or else it would just be painful for everyone.

Call for action from a Scrum Trainer

As a trainer, I don't really care whether or not you are using Scrum, there are other ways of working that’s perfectly fine for a lot of situations, but I do care greatly if you are using it wrong and it makes people suffer, that’s not the point of Scrum. I would call for Leaders including Managers, Scrum Masters and everyone to use it only when it’s the right way to help, and use it properly so no one is negatively affected during the implementation.