The tax you are paying for using Scrum
In the past few years, the way work is done in companies has changed radically. Suddenly, planning and subsequently carrying out work was not good enough. It had to be agile. Long gone were the days of waterfall, where work was planned out months — or even years — ahead, and carried out by horses with blinders on, completely oblivious to their ever changing environments. Well not literally blinded horses. But you get the point.
It certainly sounds good, working agile. It sounds a lot better than working lumbering or clumsy. Only a fool wouldn’t want to adapt to their environment, deliver a relevant product at short intervals, improving on the previously delivered product in rapid iterations. It looks great on the outside.
The word agile was chosen very meticulously. Working agile just makes sense. There’s this inherent goodness to the word. It is something you want to do, even if you don’t fully understand what it entails. It’s extremely clever marketing. And it worked, because in 2018, there are a whole lot of organisations and teams working “agile”.
There are various manifestations of the agile manifesto, though the one most frequently used is Scrum. It has taken the software development industry by storm, and even caused some collateral damage in other business sectors.
