“Scrum didn’t work for us.”

Дата публикации: 30-07-2026 19:31:05

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This is what a colleague said to me once.Hey, I’m not religious about Scrum, and if it really didn’t work, that’s really fine with me — but in my experience Scrum is so lightweight that if it isn’t working for us, it probably isn’t the framework itself, but gaps or distortions in how it is used.For instance, Scrum won’t help us if our Scrum Teams are not cross-functional and self-managing, which was the truth of the person who said that to me. If they are not cross-functional and self-managing, it’s not Scrum. It may be a case of externally managed teams working in something that looks like Sprints.“We used Scrum,” he said, “but, no, our teams weren’t self-managing, because that’s not the culture of our company, and they weren’t cross-functional, because we have dedicated requirements gathering and test teams. The team delivered untested work into a queue for the test team to pick up four or five Sprints later and picked the next Product Backlog item.”“And because they were not self-managing, the team had to wait for a manager to make the decisions, right?”“Bingo.”“And the team couldn't meet the Definition of Done within the Sprint, because the work was untested. So you couldn’t deliver a usable increment inside the Sprint and get the fast feedback that Scrum is about, right?”“Definition of Done? I don’t think we had one of those.”Scrum also won't help us if:We over-commit our Sprints to maximize output and people utilisation over value delivery, leaving the Scrum Team with no capacity for adaptation.Our focus is sticking to a plan over committing to a goal.Our Sprint Reviews are public relations events rather than a welcome, honest opportunity to robustly test if we are going in the right direction or not.We lock down all the requirements up front rather than being open to learn what the requirements really need to be in response to how people actually use the emerging product.Our ways of working are so rigidly locked down that there is no freedom for continuous improvement.The Product Owner doesn’t or can’t say no to work that is a distraction from the Product Goal.The Sprint Goal and the Sprint Backlog are created by managers outside the Scrum Team.The Scrum Team’s focus is divided over lots of development threads, making it unable to focus and get things done.I could go on, but the point is Scrum is deliberately lightweight, prescribing very little — but what it does prescribe is there for a specific and valuable reason.Of course we can all create our own customized delivery framework that superficially looks like Scrum, but where we do, we must understand it’s our custom framework that’s failing the test, not Scrum itself. Our comprehension of the why behind the what will be being tested too.If you experience Scrum as not working, before diagnosing that Scrum simply doesn’t work in your context, start by honestly checking what hasn’t been implemented from Scrum, what has been changed, what has been added, and what assumptions lie behind each of those decisions.It’s not about being defensive of Scrum. Scrum genuinely doesn’t suit some circumstances and conditions. It’s about diagnosing our product delivery problems correctly and choosing the best remediation to those problems.Wishing you maximum value,Steve.

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