We do Scrumbut
EricGu has a great post on something he calls scrumbut. It rings very true. One of the teams I was in formerly did exactly this:
- Train everyone on Scrum
- Used "Scrum, but" with all the changes that work against agile principles like no customer on the project, and wildly long deliverable cycles
- Called it scrum
- Blamed Scrum and Agile when it failed.
Certified Scrum Masters should be derided if they allow a process to be called Scrum if it doesn't stick with some basic practices:
- scope managed as a backlog
- customer decides priority for any items on the backlog
- sprints not to exceed 30 days
- team (individual contributors only, no PM, no chickens) picks the items off the backlog that they can do in a sprint.
- Use of a daily burndown to track progress, not Project or Primavera
- Monthly demonstration of progress directly to the customer or customer representative