Unfortunately, we aren't understanding the intricacies of high-performance. I've worked with maybe 150 scrum teams. 99% were mediocre. Remaining 1% understood energy usage, how to limit what they took into a sprint backlog, and how to manage their capacity.
When I asked a manager about a particular team, he said "I don't care if they do fight club in the morning, just let them keep doing what they're doing." To reframe, high-performing scrum teams are actually anti-legacy management, they get more done, are happy (low energy state) and stakeholders were satisfied. So their rolling sprint goal was taking a half day each month and going to Top Golf
. The key is, everybody on the team was a scrum sme, and understood how to work the process as a team to reinforce certainty and stability. They also didn't need a scrum master.
I've got lots of anecdotes from this couple of teams, what kind of work their managers actually did, and the sneaky ways they made the process work for them. There's a lot more to scrum than a certification. Just the teams approach to sprint planning was in a whole different class from what mediocre teams normally did.
As for the other 99% of teams, they were mostly management tools. Scrum had been co-opted, especially in orgs using the SAFe framework. This has been at F250's in my experience btw.
I wonder if this team could have choosen any framework and it would have worked, they just happened to use scrum. With the founder mode discussions recently there was this saying akin to "a successful process is a result of talented people" and not the other way around. It stuck in my head and I feel this is an instance of that. Although you definitely can force a process on a talented team and have their productivity diminish.
Agree. It's just that well understood scrum is a great process for delivering certainty and stability, as proven by lots of teams (provided they did scrum correctly).Just saves energy to thoroughly vet the process before tossing it.
But first principle, this is a physics issue: Whatever way a team comes up with to maximize the amount of work not done to deliver the same or better outcomes, I'm all for it.
When I asked a manager about a particular team, he said "I don't care if they do fight club in the morning, just let them keep doing what they're doing." To reframe, high-performing scrum teams are actually anti-legacy management, they get more done, are happy (low energy state) and stakeholders were satisfied. So their rolling sprint goal was taking a half day each month and going to Top Golf . The key is, everybody on the team was a scrum sme, and understood how to work the process as a team to reinforce certainty and stability. They also didn't need a scrum master.
I've got lots of anecdotes from this couple of teams, what kind of work their managers actually did, and the sneaky ways they made the process work for them. There's a lot more to scrum than a certification. Just the teams approach to sprint planning was in a whole different class from what mediocre teams normally did.
As for the other 99% of teams, they were mostly management tools. Scrum had been co-opted, especially in orgs using the SAFe framework. This has been at F250's in my experience btw.