I have apparently contradicting philosophies.
- Scrum isn’t good for everything. Some things are not complex enough to warrant it.
- Scrum isn’t the “secret ingredient” of your Agile transformation. If you are working very hard to do Scrum by-the-book, you are probably not seeing the benefits that you expected. Even worse, you may be making your system brittle and prone to catastrophic failure. A common pattern here is that you are producing a local maximum. You are optimizing the team doing Scrum and sacrificing all of the teams that surround it. The Scrum team is optimized, but the company or product is not.
- When you have chosen to use Scrum, if you’re trying to deviate from Scrum proper, you are probably trying to optimize the wrong thing. For instance, if you can’t get the stakeholders to attend the reviews, you stop inviting them to the review. This makes it easier on the Scrum team, but significantly increases the risk that the product you deliver will not be what they need.
