My company has seen many more ineffective Scrum implementations than effective ones. Most ineffective implementations are “Scrum-but,” meaning, “We’re doing Scrum, but we aren’t using some of its key practices.” Examples include, “We’re doing Scrum, but we aren’t doing daily standups.” Or “We’re doing Scrum, but we aren’t holding retrospectives.” Or “We’re doing Scrum, but we haven’t been able to fill the Product Owner role.” Ineffective Scrum implementations have usually removed at least one essential attribute of Scrum. Here’s my favorite example: “We looked at Scrum but found that most of the practices wouldn’t work in our organization. We’re doing Scrum, but the main practice we use is daily standups, and we do those on Fridays.”

Unlike the enormous umbrella of Agile practices generally, Scrum is a minimal process for managing workflow. Because it is already minimal, there really isn’t any part of Scrum that you can remove and still achieve the benefits of Scrum.

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