SCRUM butt and local optimum

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Many projects do not become completely agile. They start by telling we will use SCRUM for this project. A small training is provided and team goes agile. There will be some benefits in the beginning and some short comings. But definitely project is not a huge success? What is going wrong? Trigger happy top management will pull the plug telling we tried agile and it is not working for us.
When following SCRUM for the first time it is better to check whether SCRUM is followed to the full extent. As the old say it is the traditions which allowed humans to survive and evolve. It requires wise and old to tell what the tradition is. You can decide how to follow agile once you become expert on agile. How do you decide whether you are following agile to the full extent? Jeff Sutherland has developed a scoring system. This is called Nokia Test (or SRUMButt test). You can read more about this in Jeff Sutherland’s blog http://jeffsutherland.com/scrum/nokiatest.pdf.
Most of the teams claiming to follow SCRUM are only following half of the SCRUM framework. This qualifies to be called SCRUMButt. What is the problem of SCRUMButt? Each team which starts with SCRUMButt sees the benefit in the beginning. But these benefits evaporate over time? This is explained in Theory of Constraints as local optimum. You will be reaching optimum velocity for certain tasks by following SCRUMButt. This does not mean overall project has benefitted.
Let us see a scenario which is typical in SCRUMButt. There is no one dedicated as Product Owner or customer does not have time to see the demo and plan the next sprint based on it. Your team will be developing at a velocity which 3 or 4 times the traditional method. If the demo is postponed then the features get piled up. When the demo happens customer does not have enough time to dedicate to all features and ignores key changes required. This results in a bad product being developed.



SCRUMButt always results in Local optimum which results in fatigue. Compare to the analogy of a Traffic bottleneck. You have a 6 lane highway leading to a city with only two lanes. When all the travelers are going to the city there is a big bottle neck at the entrance of the city. Compare this to testing of or customer acceptance of your project. You develop at a speed possible in a 6 lane and deliver. Then there is a big wait for the next phase. When you follow SCRUM delivery is complete at every sprint. But SCRUMButt delivery waits and team waits. This causes frustration and fatigue. Local optimum does not help anybody. It might be good to have it in traditional waterfall model. It gives a high which is short lived.

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