The disastrous impact of bandwagonism on the good name of Scrum

And why you should look before you leap

Scrum has a bad reputation with many. Often this is for the wrong reasons, things that have nothing to do with the framework Scrum. We can come up with 100 awful ways to do Scrum. And we can come with even more if you challenge us to.

Scrum is victim of the bandwagon effect. It is a management fad, popular at C-level because it’s the latest and greatest around. People don’t want to miss the boat, often without understanding what it is and why it could be useful.

The result is that many of the Scrum implementations fail dramatically and with that Scrum is dismissed as hype that doesn’t deliver what it promised. Scrum gets a bad name.

People that want to adopt Scrum for the right reasons have an uphill battle to fight: many teams are weary, beaten to death by previously failed half-baked attempts to “do Scrum”.

What’s maybe even worse: people that like Scrum and as a result promote it are mistrusted as “they are only in it for the money” — Frank Zappa.

Scrum is a great framework. But it doesn’t fit all environments. For starters:

Before adopting Scrum these question require an answer:

Scrum also comes with rules:

Here are more questions worth answering:

I just quoted the first two lines of the Scrum Guide. It takes this amount of reading to understand what Scrum is useful for and what it entails.

Before adopting Scrum you need to:

Scrum could be your framework. It it a great choice for many teams, both within the software development world and elsewhere. But it could also be the wrong choice.

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