A familiar scene

Monday, 9:30. Eight people gather in front of a screen. One by one they say what they did on Friday, what they will do today, and that nothing is blocking them. A manager takes notes. Fifteen minutes later everyone returns to their desk, and nobody could say what the meeting changed.

Two weeks later the same team shows a handful of completed tickets to a small audience. Velocity is reported upward. The next sprint starts with the next tickets in the queue. The roadmap, if one exists, lives in a slide deck nobody on the team has opened since the kick-off.

Everyone in that room would say they practise Scrum. They have the vocabulary, the board and the ceremonies. What they lack is harder to see: a goal the daily meeting can inspect, a forecast that connects one sprint to the next, an architecture someone is accountable for, and increments that add up to a product.

I have seen this pattern across industries, from banking to medical device software. This essay is an attempt to explain it. My starting point may surprise some agile practitioners: the PMBOK Guide, the body of knowledge Scrum is often said to have replaced.

Scrum did not abolish project management. It redistributed it. Teams that dropped the project manager without taking on the accountabilities are Scrum in name only.