Why Scrum?

It begs the question “Why do these organizations want to adopt Scrum”?  Adopting Scrum does not mean that those formerly known as Project Managers are out of a job.  The job just becomes different.  The project world by definition is temporary.  Every project has a start and end.

The Value of Scrum

Scrum views things holistically looking at products that are being created for a customer or a consumer.  The roles in this framework and way of doing work are completely different because the approach to doing work is completely different. Yes Scrum can deliver business value faster. Yes Scrum can increase productivity.  Yes Scrum reduces risk and costs. Sounds great…where do we sign up?

Working Differently

Hold on…Scrum cannot deliver anything faster or boost any team’s productivity if work is done the same way it has always been done.  The framework requires approaching any work in a different manner.  We can’t just use Scrum roles, labels and vocabulary and expect different results. So what is preventing organizations from adopting Scrum as intended?  Many keep following project management methods but try to make the Scrum roles, artifacts and ceremonies fit into the “status quo”.  They fail to see that in order to achieve the results that many are seeing with Scrum, it requires approaching the work differently. There’s no doubt that any change is hard.  Approaches like Scrum and Agile involved doing work differently and in many cases, pose cultural changes to organizations.