If you are a manager or founder of a tech company that has a fair amount of success right now, you might be considering to switch your development over to agile. A lot (and I mean a LOT) of companies are using SCRUM nowadays to develop their mostly boring line of business software. Typically it happens always the same way. Some management guy (maybe you?) reads an article on how it affects the team’s efficiency. With this usually come promises on how much more you’re going to achieve (i.e. how much more money you’re gonna make). Of course many people get sold to this idea and make the worst decision of their life.
The first step you’re obviously gonna make is to call some agile consultants who will tell you how to switch to agile. Obviously those people are not going to tell you about the downsides of this because it’s their job to sell you the advantages. This is where I come to help! Here come the five misconsumptions about SCRUM that will make it fail in your company
1.) If everything is going great, why change in the first place?
Do you know the “never change a running system” saying? It’s a very common phrase that plagues platform vendors selling you into their latest innovations. If your development team is motivated and does a great deal of work every week, they are performing already perfectly. Great people make great software, not great processes. If your devs are pushing out releases and change requests on time and you can make money from that, why would you consider to change that? With change comes fear and doubt and that leads to slow performance.
2.) If you want your devs to do SCRUM, you have to do it as well
This is the number one misconception of any company making a switch to scrum. Whenever you hear someone say “Our dev team is doing SCRUM now” you can assume to 100% that the experiment is going to fail. See, SCRUM may be a good way to organize work and plan releases better, but it needs a corporate-wide approach. Everyone in your company needs to understand what that saying means in the first place. You need to actively enforce the agile approach across the whole company or you will be building unnecessary interfaces between teams that weren’t there before. The result? Chaos, misunderstanding, and weird new processes that need to be made.
3.) Working with customers means that you have to rethink your revenue models
This is one of the most common problems in modern-day agile working. Developers all of a sudden are required to estimate their efforts in complexity rather than in time. And your sales department suddenly doesn’t get hours to write on the bills anymore but abstract numbers saying nothing. Also your customers might think what’s wrong all of a sudden with you as they get no reliable forecast on the expenses they have to deal with. Don’t even think about converting story points into hours as you will always fail giving accurate amounts. You either lie to them or to yourself, but never you’re going to be as accurate as you’re now.
4.) Don’t let an agile consultant trick you into their way of thinking
Honestly one of the most important thinks in any business decision is to rely on your own common sense. People are successful because they’re thinking straight and able to make professional decisions based on that. If someone (whom you pay for it) tells you to believe in a time when its getting better again, better think twice. Agile consultants are trained in agile methods on the one side, and are trained sales persons on the other side. They will convince you that after an adaption period the team is performing better than ever before. But is that really the case? Comparing numbers before the change, shortly after the change, and half a year after the change will most likely give you a surprise. In 99% of the cases you will look at the same numbers as half a year before. Also it might make you think where all that money went. Wait, where’s the consultant?
5.) Don’t buy a book about SCRUM and consider yourself an expert after reading it
Agile methods and especially SCRUM are making many people a ton of money. There’s more books on how we should work than how work is actually done. Everybody working on the field will happily shower you with bullshit words like “facilitators” and “servant leaders”, but nobody will actually help you getting your team aligned. They will even go as far as to tell you that it’s not their job to do that, because everything is a team decision now. Don’t believe me? Go to a SCRUM/agile event near you and listen to what the people are saying. Nobody will want to admit they’re having problems but rather boast about how productive they are. They will even present you their way of working and in the end will tell you that it works for their company and maybe not for yours. That’s also the most common problem with SCRUM and agile: you think there’s a common guideline available. In reality the whole framework is so limply written and leaves so much room for interpretation that almost nothing you do is wrong.
Stay intelligent and critical and think about if you really want it
There’s lots of evidence and case studies proving that agile methods can work. If you really are considering doing that switch, ask your people first. Work with them instead of with someone external. Give a shit about SCRUM trainings and find what works for you. According to the agile manifesto it anyway can’t be wrong. Don’t become a member of a sect you cannot escape anymore. And use all that fancy excess money to make some cool corporate parties. They will also boast productivity and give you a nice hangover to remember.
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