Delivery leadership · Long read
Scrum in Name Only
What teams lost when they got rid of the project manager, and how to recover the essence of Scrum by reading it through the discipline it is often said to replace.
Summary
- Many teams that call themselves Scrum teams keep three rituals (a daily meeting, a sprint backlog, a demo) and little else. They are Scrum in name only.
- The root cause is a misreading. Scrum is treated as the opposite of traditional project management, so the project manager goes, and the work the project manager did goes with it.
- Scrum never abolished project management. It redistributed its accountabilities across the Product Owner, the Scrum Master, the Developers and the framework's artifacts. Teams that dropped the role without taking on the accountabilities lost the timeline, the architecture and the coherence of the product.
- PMBOK and Scrum share an ancestor in Deming's improvement cycle. They differ in how they treat uncertainty: PMBOK protects a baseline, Scrum updates a forecast.
- Recovery starts at the bottom of the iceberg: restore the goals, create the conditions for honest inspection, and give every orphaned accountability an owner. The rituals regain their meaning last.