Fixing Your Scrum

Turning Scrum into Best Practices

Ryan once worked with an organization whose Project Management Office created a 500-page Scrum manual that detailed the processes and “best” practices that all their Scrum teams had to follow. Not surprisingly, these “Scrum” best practices looked a lot like the old waterfall processes the company used prior to adopting Scrum. We aren’t against teams creating their own practices within the Scrum framework—that’s actually a good sign of a team that’s working well together. But we’ve seen many organizations take the idea of “best” practices too far (like with the 500-page manual). A best practice is a practice you adopt and use everywhere all the time as the best way to do your work. But the type of work that Scrum ...