Scrum not working for you? Here's why...

I've had people write me and say...

"HL, I believe in what you say in your blog, because you were Scrum before Scrum was the 'in' thing to be."

Others write to say...

"My team has this nuance and that idiosyncrasy, so Scrum just won't work for us."

Believe it or not, both of these statements equally frustrate me.

Sure, Decade Software's Development Team has been incredibly successful using Scrum, and today Scrum is seeing successes throughout our company—even in Client Services, but Scrum is not the only reason for these successes.

It's true everyone is jumping on the Scrum bandwagon these days, and not everyone is successful. Some fail, because they are really following Scrumbut and not Scrum—but most fail simply because...

...they do not understand the problem they are trying to solve.

For any team to be successful, the following must be established:

• Clear, realistic goals must be defined in a clear priority order and updated on a known schedule within parameters understood by everyone on the team.
• Dependencies between team members must be defined to achieve these goals, ensuring a sharing of commitments to form a true team.
• Transparency of process must exist throughout, allowing each team player to see what every other team player is doing and knowing when they are moving closer or farther from the goals.
• Team culture must enable team players to admit they need help and to accept help without any feelings of failure or expectation of retribution.
• Within the set parameters of the business domain, the team members—not management—must be allowed to identify and solve their problems themselves.
• Management must support removal of all obstacles to achieving goals, or management must allow the team to remove the goals.

These are the fundamentals that allow teams to grow and endure all hurdles.

Setting up this environment is the problem you are trying to solve.

Do this, and all of your other problems will resolve themselves.

Trust me: Scrum is a tool that will help you solve this problem, but even the best shovel will seem useless if you do not know you have a hole to dig.