What is the frustration most Scrum Team Experienced?

On July 7th the Scrum community gathered in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) for the 5th edition of Scrum Day Europe. The goal was to generate insights and define improvements for the Scrum framework from the Scrum community.

During the day we asked everyone to answer 5 questions:

What has proven to be the strength of Scrum the past 20 years?
What should be the focus of Scrum the upcoming 20 years?
What of Scrum frustrated you the most so far?
What connects you to Scrum?
What is a small improvement that could be added to Scrum?

Every participant contributed and provided input; thereby it proved to be a true community event!

This years theme was ‘the next iteration’ .Therefore we looked back to see what Scrum brought us the last 20 years, but also looked forward into the future of Scrum. Naturally, the evaluation was done via a retrospective.

What is the Strength of Scrum According to the Participants?

It’s an easy & lightweight framework (6x)
It’s a transparency enabler (5x)
It delivers a framework that leads to sustainable and continuous improvement (4x)
It appeals to universally basic human needs & values (3x)
It provides short feedback loops, continuous planning (3x)
It removes client-supplier boundaries (2x)
It’s fun and successful (2x)
It’s an enabler of personal growth
The usage of time-boxes
It improves communication on all layers
It’s not a silver bullet
It emphasizes multidisciplinary teamwork

What should be the focus of Scrum in the upcoming years according to the Participants?

Support creating value driven organizations, focus on customer delight (9)
Enhance the framework for the whole organization (9)
Keep the simplicity (3)
Setup processes/gateways before the next sprint can start (2)
Offer more practices that support scaling Scrum (2)
Prove with the metrics that Scrum works! (2)
Keep innovating and adapting
Deliver working increments
Address interfacing with non-Scrum organizations
Setup practices to develop culture
Embrace the Lean mindset
Integrate DevOps principles
Focus on the Sprint Goal
Offer tools to check the sanity of the product incrementally
Collaborate with multiple independent organizations
Offer Scrum for corporate executives
Apply the Scrum in other “slow development” industries e.g. pharma
Have more discussion with critics to understand what they feel is missing in Scrum
Research how much Agile is “Agile”. Because some organizations abuse Agile.

What of Scrum frustrated you the most so far according to the participants?

Scrum seems so simple, but it is so hard (6)
The Scrum zombie variant (5)
Misunderstanding of the Scrum Master role (4)
Product Owner without mandate (4)
Management unwilling to change (2)
Roles require above average people
Values of Scrum and current organization don’t match
The pure focus on software development
Not knowing what to do with portfolio/product management
The lack of just-do-it
Working water-scrum-fall
Team communication

What connects you to Scrum according to the participants?

Scrum works, start finishing! (5)
Collaboration addiction (5)
Awesome work atmosphere (3)
Invite people to continuously improve, one small step at a time (3)
I personally got the fun back into my working life! (2)
Decentralized decision-making (2)
My 21 years of working in waterfall
Common senseity of Scrum
Living it! Using it on work and personally
Living it! Dealing with unknows

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