Chaos stands for orderliness, confusion,
lack of pattern to make sense of. Scrum stands for basic minimum guidelines, a
way to empower the community to create and deliver value. However, for a scrum
master, these are the best friends and a must use tool to disturb the system
and let it align itself for better.
Remember this, scrum is minimum
process. Remember process has wastes and its costly to implement too in most of
the scenarios. If we revisit the scrum basics, its about trimming the value stream
for reducing wastes.
Years before, I was in a maintenance
organization, the challenge it faced was that productivity wasn’t increasing
even though the team was the same and the code base / the work was the same.
The team had gotten used to the daily mechanics and there was no incentive to
change this. The fear of politics was keeping many of the leaders from fine
tuning the value chain. However, I saw something very different when we had
gone for a outbound. It was for community service and the teams that were
formed on the fly had to compete with each other on who does something fast.
There was healthy competition, there were so much energy and the same fat ass
bench warmers were at the peak of their lean journey that outing. What happened
to the same group? Might be that they liked the work they did, might be they
were looking for change after so much of monotonous scrum journey in office.
Whatever it be but it was fluid.. very agile. Even if the requirement wasn’t clear,
the team dynamics got them together, made them collaborate even if there was un-certainty
and find out answers.
Now see, isn’t this the actual purpose
of scrum?
We are humans, Monotonous execution
bores us. Being process centric takes away
the incentive to collaborate. Time to change it and shake it up a bit. Let
chaos do this nasty job.. introduce it, stop providing answers to every little
crib and the team will have to constantly talk and innovate.
