Hi Carlos. Your article was pretty insightful about many things. I am sorry for the negative tone I took — it is from being so accustomed to hearing people defend Scrum, claiming in essence that Scrum is perfect, and the problem can never be Scrum, and the only way to be Agile is to use Scrum — “pure” Scrum, as if that is always the solution.

As you said, Scrum does not scale. And I think it is prescriptive because of the community — not Scrum itself, but the Scrum community that insists that Scrum is perfect.

I agree that much of the “must not be doing it right” came from organizations indeed not doing it right. But some of that — quite a bit I think — also came form Scrum fanatics insisting that the problem cannot be Scrum. Sometimes the problem is Scrum: because of what Scrum leaves out, and because Scrum causes people to focus too much on things that don’t matter that much. Also, Scrum’s model of leadership is wrong. Leadership is really important. Servant leadership is not the way that the Scrum community describes it. Real servant leadership carries authority and accountability. Here is an article that I wrote about leadership in an Agile context.

Also, one does not need Scrum to be Agile — not at all. I was on some very Agile projects during the 1980s — way before the term “Agile” existed”. IMO, Scrum actually gets in the way of being Agile. Agile should be thoughtful, as in “how can we make our teams work better?”— not standing up a set of predefined ceremonies. The ceremonies make people think they are done, and Scrum people spend hours analyzing if the ceremonies are being done right, and forget to pay attention to more important things such as production defect rate and product feature cycle time.

Here is an article that I wrote about how SpaceX is Agile — and no sign of Scrum anywhere!