Describe your agile working reality at your current position
Hi Scrum fans,
the longer I'm around here, the more I read about how Scrum masters are not even called scrum masters but hold other positions in their companies. That you should not prescribe Scrum to your team but advise the team and then help them implement whatever they think will work best for them. And more.
In other words, the "ideal world" described in the Scrum Guide doesn't seem to be reality anywhere, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. But I would love to know how your organisation, your team, does ... well, whatever it does. Whether you consider this Scrum, Scrum Light, or nothing at all.
I'll start:
In my organisation, we have many different types of projects (I'm not even going to start calling them products). Management is not actively involved in becoming more agile; they often seem to be supportive of some of the ideas described in the agile manifesto, but in reality I think they're just more comfortable staying with waterfall approaches. There are agile influences, but I have yet to see a "full" Scrum project.
We've had SAFE, we've had LESS (at least I heard, I wasn't involved), and I'm currently involved in a project that has, nominally, a Scrum Master, but several different levels of leadership and no one product owner (rather, one PO per team, with no clear guideline as to what exactly that team's product should be; we're all working on the same product, in theory).
My team has recently decided to switch from "Kanban" (which wasn't Kanban, we used a board with the typical To Do/In Progress/In Review/Done lanes, but we had never implemented any improvements to our flow, no WIP limits, no metrics) to Scrum.
Our first sprint is still on-going. Planning did not contain any sprint goals or discussions around them, instead we put everything into the sprint that was still in progress from before we started sprinting. Planning concluded with a dev saying "wait, I don't have anything to do yet, can we add more tickets", which we subsequently did.
Our dailies are status meetings (but some of us still use it to align with other team members, so they're not a total waste), with the PO always adding at least 5-10 minutes time at the end to discuss something that is unrelated to the sprint, but going to be relevant some time in the future.
We haven't had any discussions around the Review or Retro yet, and I don't want to assume things that have yet to happen, so won't comment on that.
As far as I can tell, we're a long way from any real agile way of working, and I'm not sure we're going to be allowed the time to find ourselves in this setup.
We have a definition of Done, but it's hardly ever paid any attention. We have coding and review guidelines but only about half the team uses them, the other half prefer "a more flexible" style (which means they're mostly working in jupyter notebooks, not even contributing to a shared codebase).
I don't wish for any hints about my situation, I really just wish to hear from other experiences. Maybe there's something I can learn from that! :)
Cheers,
Lexi
In other words, the "ideal world" described in the Scrum Guide doesn't seem to be reality anywhere
True statement and I kind of empathize with your situation.
I have worked with teams that claim they use Scrum but when I involve and engage with them, I realize they do everything but Scrum (and sometimes don't even need Scrum). So what happens is that a 3-4 month plan is prepared and even sprints are planned (like this is the milestone at the end of sprint 1 etc.) and Scrum /sprints are used for the execution. This kills empiricism, scrum ceremonies lose their significance (daily scrum = status update, sprint review=demo) and these plans almost always fail.
In some cases, the ask from a Scrum master is to customize scrum as per the organization (this happens in certain domains where Scrum might not be the best fit but they do it nevertheless).This was frustrating at first, but I did do it by just changing the nomenclature by just calling it an iteration (and not Scrum ...event names would be like iteration planning, iteration standups etc.).
All you need to be focused on is the outcome (the value delivered with best quality) and not essentially be worried about if teams are doing Scrum the right way or not (if you are stuck in such scenario as you describe).
However, try your best to take them as close to ideal Scrum as possible.