I just finished reading Scrum: the Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff and JJ Sutherland . Jeff Sutherland co-created Scrum in the 90s. JJ Sutherland is the CEO of Scrum Inc and works closely with his father.
Prior to this, I’ve read the big thick technical tomes on Scrum, mostly published in the early 00s, and more blog posts than I care to admit. I’ve also practiced Scrum, at some level and in some form, for the last 15 years. I’ve adopted Scrum and adapted Scrum leading dev teams startups and large enterprises. But I’m not a Scrum master. I’m not trained or certified in Scrum. As is clear from Sutherland’s book, I’m the person in the role that Scrum wants to replace: the engineering manager.
Even though the father-son team that wrote this less technical and more introspective Scrum book and run Scrum Inc have little use for managers like me, I like Scrum. I’ve seen amazing results from each Scrum practice that I’ve supported. I was part of the management team at Spotify when we developed the famous Tribes, Squads, Chapters, and Guilds strategy of scaling an engineering culture. From my perspective, when Scrum works, it works well in every dimension. Developers and stakeholders are happy, work is visible and predictable, and products better fit their purpose.
Curiously Scrum doesn’t like me and my kind-as a manager. And Scrum’s dislike is not unfounded: Most of the resistance to Scrum comes from management. As the Sutherlands note, even after a wildly successful Scrum implementation, it’s usually the managers who “pull back” from Scrum and return an org to “command and control”. I have personally not tried to claw back Scrum but I understand and sympathize with the impulse.
In this series of blog posts I’m going to explore the relationship of managers and management to scrum masters and Scrum. I want to explore why Scrum left the management role out of the equation and why an elegant and powerful algorithm and data structure like Scrum is so hard to implement without destroying the aspects that make it work in the first place. Finally, I will give some tips to improve the Scrum process so that managers are not the enemy but rather the friend of Scrum.
Before we go I just want to point out that while I’ve read and watched plenty of blog posts, tweets, and YouTube Videos declaring that Agile is dead and that Scrum is Not an Agile Framework neither of these sentiments are true!
Agile and Scrum have problems, mostly because both were conceived with particular aspects of work culture ignored: like managers, governance, telecommunications, and large teams. Agile and Scrum were also cooked up before today’s highly mobile, remote-mostly, co-working culture became popular/possible. That Agile and Scrum have survived these transformations mostly intact points to the strength of these methods of human collaboration.
Agile is not dead and Scrum is a flavor of Agile. Let’s help them live up to their ideals!