People new to Scrum or without formal training sometimes use Scrum as an excuse for various bad practices. These practices can be very unproductive and may undercut many of the benefits that the organization is seeking from an Agile transformation in the first place. For example, Scrum is no excuse not to create a forecast for delivery or to accept a lack of direction for your product. This article will discuss three common bad practices and explain why Scrum is no excuse.
1. No Forecast
Too many people think that Scrum means we can’t forecast or meet deadlines. As with so many things, there is a nuance here. Scrum teams need to be empowered to push back on unrealistic deadlines, but they must also be able to set and meet realistic deadlines to increase predictability, trust, and transparency.
How is this done? In Scrum, the Product Owner is accountable for forecasting. To do this, the Product Owner works with the Scrum team, considering their history (velocity or throughput, for example) and the content and ordering of the Product Backlog. The Product Owner then creates a forecast representing the team’s best guess as to when they will meet a certain goal or deliver upcoming releases. For more on how to forecast, check out our recent article Part II: When will we get there? Forecasting for Scrum teams.
Can the Scrum team meet hard deadlines set by the organization? It depends on whether the deadline is realistic or not. But what the Scrum team can do is to provide a realistic forecast of what it expects to be able to deliver by a certain date. In fact, Scrum can increase your team’s ability to meet hard deadlines by helping the Product Owner make smarter decisions on what is most important and providing visibility into progress through incremental delivery. See our recent article Can Scrum Work for Hard Deadlines? for more information.
Why Predictability Matters
For the past four years, increasing predictability has been among the top ten reasons organizations adopt Agile (17th Annual State of Agile report created by Digital.ai).
Predictability builds trust and confidence in an Agile team’s ability to deliver value to the customer. In addition, predictability helps the customer and the organization coordinate and prepare for the results of the Scrum team’s work.
Scrum is no excuse for not creating a forecast. Scrum explicitly assigns the responsibility for creating a forecast to the Product Owner. In addition, Scrum helps make forecasts more accurate because delivering work incrementally actually aids the Product Owner in creating a more accurate forecast. That's because, with incremental delivery, it is easy in Scrum to see exactly what is delivered, making forecasting future delivery easier.
A forecast is not unchangeable
Because Scrum is used for complex work, it is essential to understand that the forecast - like the weather - can always change. As the Scrum team learns more, they will update their forecast to reflect the latest information. Does that mean the Scrum team is unpredictable? Absolutely not. We are transparent about where we are today and where we expect to be tomorrow, and that is as predictable as you can be when working complexly.