Making Scrum Suck Less

How Scrum Masters (and Managers) Go Astray By Committing to Plans

I’ve found only one sane thing to commit to in product.

Scrum Master presenting his commitment to deliver to an upfront plan. | Photo by Mikael Blomkvist on Pexels

Imagine your success gets measured on your ability to predict the unpredictable.

Sounds ridiculous, huh? Yet, this is how many default to measuring Scrum Masters and their team’s performance. It’s the rampant, default behavior in organizations today.

We ask our teams to commit to the uncontrollable:

• Estimates of work effort captured as relative story points.
• Completion of the plan and scope from Sprint Planning.
• Completion of a Sprint Goal by the end of the Sprint.
• Attainment of outcomes from all output.

Here’s the problem. The number of variables outside the team’s control in product work is massive. It’s like asking teams to commit to predict where a paper airplane will land in a hurricane.

• “We didn’t know that other team had to do part of the work.”
• “We forgot about the brittleness of the code we must change.”
• “The users actually need different features than those planned.”
• “The users aren’t using…