And now all the Scrum fans will come forward and insist that the problem is not Scrum. Here is one, posted by Jens Finkhaeuser: “These aren’t really failures of Scrum, they’re failures of implementation.”

Or maybe the problem is Scrum: that because it is an overly simplistic process, it makes people think that they just need to follow the process — but the process does not work by itself.

Or that getting Scrum to “work right” is so hard, that maybe trying to follow Scrum is very likely to lead people down the wrong path.

I have seen all the things the author describes. I believe that the problem is Scrum, because it is a prescriptive methodology. People try to follow it, when instead they should be thinking about how they work, and how to work better.

I will point out that I was on many highly successful IT projects before Scrum existed — highly Agile projects. You don’t need Scrum to be Agile, and in fact Scrum gets in the way, IMO.

What really helps to make you Agile is to have a servant leader — someone who is a leader (not a mere facilitator), but whose goal is to make the team effective. What also really helps is when that leader encourages thoughtful discussion about issues as they arise. And makes sure that the team gets organized before it starts working on stories — set up the pipelines: if you try to do that during sprints, it will be a disaster, and so that is why you need a “sprint 0”. And automate almost everything — from the beginning. And think end-to-end — not just in terms of your little piece. And end-to-end includes the actual users or customers: they should be trying things out as they are developed. And publish Lean metrics, such as feature cycle time and production incident rate.

Forget Scrum: its practices don’t add much, and it just tends to distract people from what does matter.