Agile/SCRUM approach - noticed issues

Any Paradigm, which has human interaction at its heart, will fail if human psychology is not understood and taken into account. While applying Scrum we must always keep in mind following things:

  • People will always put their own interests ahead of interests of the group
  • People are self-interested
  • It is very difficult to get more than 5 people to agree on anything

So, I want to share my observations. You can decide if it is good or bad and how to solve it:

- Scrum Masters turn themselves into Project Administrators. It is the Team who is responsible for delivery, since main responsibility of Scrum Master is to make sure that team is following Scrum and remove impediments.

- Each team chooses different development approaches and tools for internal communication, since they are self-organized. And those decisions depend on team experience, knowledge and etc., which doesn’t mean that the best decision is made.

- It become difficult to solve impediments related to cross team communication, since every team is only concerned about their own Sprint goals.

- Teams start focusing on accounting the time rather than results and goals, especially at the start of Scrum adoption. It also appears with more experienced teams, especially if team experience difficulties to make a technical decision.

- Not raising impediments. In some contexts (e.g. if trust is lacking or in cultures where maintaining face is important), it may be difficult to raise issues in a meeting or a stand up.

- Everyone is responsible means no one is responsible. Some people use it to find excuses or to hide their incompetence, errors and other problems. It is always easy to say “The Team failed” or “You didn’t follow the Scrum”, but not “I failed” and it doesn’t matter in which role you are – developer, tester, scrum master, product owner.

So, don‘t forget to encourage the most valuable and productive aspects of human nature, whilst constraining the expression of some of its worst and most destructive aspects.