Where it becomes a problem is where it's used to enforce underlying pathologies like micromanagement. But if your shop has a micromanagement problem, you'll be miserable, Scrum or no Scrum.
Corporate suits eat that shit up. The value add of scrum, to them, is everything devs hate. They love the burn down charts, the timelines for features, the resource allocation, the ability to fly in and say "You are working on polish? WTH value add does that bring to the company? Dump it and do feature 123 instead!"
And, unfortunately, corporate suits tend to pay the bills.
I'm sure there are companies out there that don't fall into micromanagement shit, but I'm convinced it's an inevitability that any successful company will eventually turn into a feature factory hell hole.
Before that the master really tried to have meaningful retros. Now we type some things in a doc, everyone is silent, and the master has dropped any mention of follow up or takeaways.
...and this is a company with a good culture! I have done this dance at places where the culture was not good. As a person renowned in my circle for technical ability and productivity this was the only place where I couldn't get anything done and was removed from the account by the manager. Relief.
One group I was in everything was a #1 priority. I had to sit the manager down in his office for a couple of hours and make him pick the priorities. It turns out he did not know what he really wanted, yet he wanted to micromanage everything. I had to show him that you have 4 devs and they can not work on 15 things at the same time 200% of the time. They have lives outside of work and you will get nothing done if they are jumping around at every whim you come up with. After that the team worked much better. I would at the start of each sprint make him pick what order he wants things in then the devs could come in and fix it up correctly.
Team management is totally on the table of 'things to work on' in scrum yet many PM's seem to forget that.
My new team has 3 15-30 min calls a day. I just joined this team so I am watching for now for a couple of sprints. But you can bet money on the fact I am bringing that up in a retro. You are distracting everyone at regular intervals and they can not get into anything because they are always prepping for your status meetings. You are leaving them basically 30% of their day to actually do anything related to the things you want status on.
A good PM who 'gets it' is great. One who strictly follows the metrics... yeah
I’ve literally told our internal users “if you can’t tell me which of these two things is more important to you, my team will work on them in whichever order is best for us.”
“If you could only have one and then the other, which would you pick to go first?” “But we have to have them both.” “Are they related/linked?” “No.” “Then which would you want first?” “I want them both.” “Thank you; I don’t need any more information from you.”
Haha this is funny because it's so true. And this is a person who is actually a supposed to be a professional at allocating resources ;)
Daily also don't make sense, because the team has several major tracks in parallel and I can't really contribute to what others are doing, unless I decide to put my work aside and/or overwork.
Why this? My guess is that it's more convenient for a manager to have a more consistent view of what's happening. On the other hands there are team members that like to hear what's happening besides their own work, and such meetings give them that opportunity.
The luck we have are the retrospective meetings: one of the most efficient ways to actually make actionable things. This meetung I would never cancel, because it has nothing to do with the sprint but with the teamwork, workload, etc.
The issue with all "things" is the ability of people to be able to adapt it to the own workflow. It takes balls and experience.
> ...provides a light framework/training wheels... Start with 15 minute daily standups and 2 week sprints, for example, but if you work better with a twice-weekly standup and a 6 week sprint, fine.