Scrum Without Tears

"Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify."
— Henry David Thoreau

Scrum Today

Over the years what was once described as "a simple approach to solve complex problems" has itself become something more like a complicated approach to solve simple problems. Used in the corporate IT world as yet another coercive approach to control workers and achieve compliance, Scrum is applied in many unnecessary situations, and probably 90% of the time completely misunderstood.

Product owners are junior business analysts with no decision-making responsibilities, tasked merely with writing 'user stories'; scrum masters are expected to police developers, to monitor and measure them; development teams are more siloed than cross functional, frequently failing to deliver value each sprint; and scrum events are largely a waste of time, with no sense of purpose. With such anti-patterns, it is no wonder Scrum is more often considered a back-breaking burden, rather than the wings of freedom and engagement it was intended to be.

Scrum Tomorrow

Scrum Without Tears offers a deconstructed, stripped-down approach to Scrum. Using the simple guide to Scrum as its foundation, and staying true to the principles of the agile manifesto, Scrum Without Tears strips away all superfluity, and puts the focus back where it belongs: on the workers and the users. Scrum at its heart is a conversation between those requesting the work, and those doing the work. Scrum teams need to work with full autonomy towards clear goals. It's that simple. Lacking one or the other is a guarantee for frustration and disengagement. It is time to revisit the purpose of Scrum, to learn how to strip away the dross and uncover the diamond, to rediscover the simple joy of self-organisation and renewed trust.

Scrum Without Tears

The London Scrum Academy will soon be offering online Scrum Without Tears workshops, both publicly and privately. Each workshop is six hours in duration; a workshop can be completed in a single day, or paced over a series of days. On successful completion participants will be offered the Scrum Without Tears badge to display on LinkedIn or other profiles, and will be invited to complete a longer Scrum program to become a London Scrum Academy Associate.

Who is this for?

Scrum Without Tears is open to scrum practitioners and those who support and champion scrum. The more members of an organisation who learn about the true nature of scrum, the greater the likelihood of success.

Scrum Team Members

Whether you are a product owner, scrum master, coder, tester, designer or any other kind of developer, you are part of a team—small, a self-managing, cross-functional team to be precise. If you are not working collaboratively with all your other team members, and establishing collaborative relationships with those you serve, then you are doing this wrong, or at best sub-optimally. Discover, in just a single day, how to turn this around: how to move from frustrating compliance to engaged responsiveness.

Managers and Executives

If you are not getting the value you felt you were promised when you adopted this way of working, please pause before throwing it out. Scrum is probably the simplest and most effective way of delivering high-quality products based on actual user need, and doing so regularly, with low overhead. If you currently don't experience this, please come along to learn how simple it is to change what you currently do to what you are truly capable of doing. Doing Scrum well is not about adding anything; it is only about stripping away all that is superflous. Find out how to do less in order to achieve more.

HR, Sales, Marketing, Facilities...

If you work with, or for scrum teams your understanding and support is vital. Consider learning more about the spirit of Scrum, so you can collaborate more meaningfully with developers, product owners and scrum masters.

About the Facilitator

Discovering XP in 1998 set Tobias Mayer on a journey of discovery into all things Agile. He has been practicing Scrum since 2003, and in 2005 was among the first twenty-five people, worldwide, certified to teach Scrum by Ken Schwaber, its co-founder.

Skilled as a developer, tester, engineering manager, and creative director Tobias also has a background in publishing, theatre arts, and community service work. He skilfully blends this unusual mix of experiences when teaching Scrum, creating a lively and engaging experience.

Tobias is the author of the highly acclaimed, and somewhat controversial book, The People's Scrum, is co-presenter of The 800lb Agile Gorilla, and has written extensively on leadership, citizenship and corporate transformation. He also speaks regularly at Agile conferences and has been interviewed for many Agile podcasts and videocasts.

Why this approach?

The London Scrum Academy has chosen to move towards this simple, more direct, and more inclusive approach to Scrum due to what is perceived as unnecessary bloat to an elegant system, brought about by the framework being forced on workers who didn't ask for it, by outsiders who stand to gain financially from its imposition. Scrum grew from organisational need, and to continue being useful it must be embraced by people at all levels of the adopting organisation.

Read the Simple guide to Scrum.

 

---