Question of the Day:

If Scrum is so great—if it really lets you do “twice the work in half the time,” as Jeff Sutherland’s book proclaims—then why doesn’t everyone use it?

Why don’t your CEO, CTO, or COO put all their tasks into JIRA?

Why aren’t there Scrum Masters all over the organization, running meetings for accounting, marketing, HR, product development, finance, legal, and sales?

Why aren’t your managers—the very people who are convinced that this is the only reasonable way to manage and track engineers—putting their tasks into backlogs, doing weekly grooming meetings, and holding daily morning stand-ups?

Answer:

They don’t want to be micro-managed.

They want the autonomy to work on projects, not just errands.

They want to be trusted to accomplish big things without being checked up on every step of the way.

They want input into the vision and direction of their work.

They want the freedom to work in ways that work best for them.

Is it unreasonable for software engineers to want the same freedom as everyone else?

Scrum is dumb!