“Stripped of their original purpose, this is what so many Scrum events have become: a series of actions performed by rote.”
A lot of it has become theater and sprint planning may be one of the worst things any organization can do.
https://chrisjameslennon.medium.com/the-age-of-scrum-is-over-185407ad705b
Lots of teams try to dogmatically implement scrum without looking at their team and goals. There are lots of alternative ways of doing things most of which will be more agile, not less.
Lots of examples here by Intercom about how to enable teams to ship as fast as possible and at the same time also as safely as possible.
https://www.intercom.com/blog/ship-fast-safe-learn-from-production/
Momentum definitely is magic and I’d add that you get it by focusing on tempo.
Working in the Spotify organizational structure can be a bit tiresome but I’m glad we’re getting the important stuff from their product development culture, listed here by Jason Yip, right as well: aligned autonomy, trust and decoupling. Without those the structure indeed does not matter.
People leaving your team have a cost that is far far larger than what you can directly see (and we know what a challenge directing stuff that you can’t see is). These visualizations
by Benji Weber put forth a strong argument especially against people working as isolated individuals on things.
An entire article about speed vs. velocity vs. tempo that can be summarized as: “Orientation is the Schwerpunkt.” How much does your team invest into orienting themselves before they take on new work?
One of the things I have to fight the most for and that I think is what allows me to work well: “Regularly get in your team’s shoes”. Call it Genba, or Fingerspitzengefühl but the most important thing is to stay in touch with your team’s day to day reality.
https://www.okayhq.com/blog/status-quo-is-so-hard-to-change-in-engineering-teams
I often get surprised reactions when I say that we don’t do Scrum. After reading about how other technology companies run their projects, it seems that Scrum—which is wasteful and does not fit reality—is on the way out.
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/project-management-at-big-tech/
Agile is setup as a bit of a straw man in this piece about scaling product delivery, but it is true that following the existing methods too rigidly will not get you where you want to be. I’d rephrase it to say that mature teams need to be able to reflect and create their own systems as they go.