I know it’s a weird topic but when i do retrospection with different scrum teams, i generally face strange excuses. I am trying to recollect some of such excuses from my last few years of experience when i saw Agile overtaking methodical Waterfall approach.
Scope excuses –
- We (Scrum Team) don’t need requirements well written, cos we are agile. We discover and evolve requirements on the fly.
- We (Scrum Team) can absorb last minute priority changes as we are Agile in all ways. Please let me do my coding now.
Schedule excuses –
- We (Scrum Team) don’t need to breakdown our work and then schedule them hard with right identification of dependencies. We just need to know the tasks of tomorrow and that’s it.
- I (Srcum Team Member) have always understood 1 story-point equivalent to 1 day effort and it’s not my fault if rest of the scrum team have different standard of efforts for the same story-point.
Quality excuses –
- When i (Scrum Master) have been kind enough to absorb last minute changes by Product Owner, why Product Owner is not kind enough to accept my Product with less quality.
- I (QA Engineer) always receive Product Release in the last minute of Sprint and then asked to stretch. I am demotivated as most of the time i am not able to run enough quality cycles within given time.
- I (QA Engineer) am always blamed for not being Agile and resistant to last minute changes
Resource excuses –
- I (Team Member) am a shared resource and always in trouble in right justification of time on multiple Agile Projects. Each of them have priority of sprint backlog with same degree.
- I (Scrum Master) don’t do team building/revision until Sprint starts and why should i care about Organization wide resource planning cos i am Agile.
Role excuses –
- I am Scrum Master of many Projects because i used to play the role of Program Manager and same (bossy) role i want to justify in Scrum Model as well.
Super Duper excuse –
- Who says we are not Agile, we have been using JIRA for our Project Management and we are also having daily stand ups on top of that. We follow Hybrid approach actually 🙂
Enough said about excuses. I believe that it’ not just adoption of a smarter Methodology, rather this is change of mindset. In all cases, a great Planning (Scope, Schedule, Resource), Risk Assessment, clarity on roles and responsibilities, alignment with market commitment are still required.
It can be a great factor to make Scrum a successful model if every stakeholder gets trained and certified in this methodology and benefit organization with values rather than burdening with excuses.
Good Luck