Yesterday I went to the Agile Open Lima, an event where agilists and people who want to learn agile meet. In one of the talks, we discussed about possible cases when it is not recommendable to use SCRUM. Since there are many talks about their benefits over waterfall, I found interesting to also know when it's not good to apply SCRUM, this is the summary:
1. Think that with scrum I will make my projects faster
Not! This is the first distinction to make. Scrum, or in general any other agile methodology, does not mean that you will be faster or you will finish your projects in less time. It means that you will react faster to changes, you will adapt to them and you will be more flexible. If you think that SCRUM will make your projects faster, you should NOT use scrum.
2. Fashion
The competitor is using SCRUM so I also want to use it. Fashion is not a good reason to start adapting agile, you might not need it, if you try to force its use you could end up applying it wrongly. Before you want to use SCRUM, think about it, do you really need it? Do not do it for fashion.
3. Legal / Regulatory Projects
Scrum works well when scope or time is flexible, when they can be changed. This is not possible in projects where there are fixed deadlines with no possibility of changes or the scope can not be modified, as it happens in legal projects.
4. Think agile is only the provider's responsability.
When we hire a software factory as partner/provider to develop a project, if you think that with the sole fact that they are using agile methodologies you will have nothing to do, you should not use SCRUM. SCRUM involves both partner and customer commitment. This is one of the key factors of agile, a closer relationship with the customer, to understand it, to receive feedback. If you think it is only thethe responsability of your software provider, do not use scrum.
5. Projects already started (in cascade)
This was an from a personal experience of the facilitator. Usually, projects already started have fixed budget and deadlines. Change it to agility means investing in time and budget so that the team understands the new methodology and starts using it properly, which might not please the customer, because that was supposed to be done in an initial stage. The recommendation is, if you want to apply SCRUM? Okay, let's do it but in the next project, from scratch.
6. Think that people are resources
If one resource is inefficient you replace it for another. In scrum, if a person is inefficient we try to understand why and try to solve it. It may be because of lack of motivation, external factors that are beyond their control, lack of training, etc. etc. In scrum, a motivated team has the potential to be a high-performance team. If you still think they are resources, do not use scrum, you have to change first this mindset.
7. High priority tasks
In scrum deliverables are presented at the end of each sprint, which can be 2 or 3 weeks depending on what the team defined. High priority tasks do not fit in this, they need to be deployed as soon as possible. Tasks with changing priorities are also not recommended for sprints, in a sprint what is defined in the planning is what is delivered at the end of the sprint. For high-priority tasks kanban has better results.
Do you know any other reason when not to use SCRUM?
Source: Agile Open Lima IX at UPC