Let's go back to waterfall

This blog is a series of posts on the common and difficult challenges many professionals face while implementing Agile. Agile is easy on process but many of us underestimate the difficulty of making it work.



There is a  possibility that one or many of the team members can come back to SM(Scrum Master) or to the management suggesting to go back to waterfall. Instead of passing the buck to the management(it is the management that wants us to do Agile) try to have a meaningful conversation with the team to understand why they think agile is not working. 

On a lighter note SM can always say OK, let's go back to writing a 100-page spec document and many more meetings to review them 🤣


Some of the most common reasons are: 

1) Lack of appropriate training of Agile methodology

2) Lack of hands-on training on tools JIRA, scrum boards, etc. 

3) Moving away from comfort zone(the waterfall) 

4) Pressure from management to deliver 

5) Skillset gap 

6) In waterfall development team is told what to do and the accountability(not responsibility) rests with the management layer, while in Scrum the accountability steers towards the scrum team and it can be a frightening situation for the team

7) or any other personal commitments 


Recommendation for SM: 

1) Work with PO and management to build a product roadmap and delivery plan to mitigate delivery pressure/anxiety.

2) What exact process/things do they feel missing w.r.t waterfall and understand how is their feedback handled in Agile methodology. They are helping to identify gaps and it is important to ensure that these are covered in some way in the scrum. 

3) Build trust and collaboration for mitigating accountability anxiety. Many a time things will not go as per plan but instead of finger-pointing a team that trusts each other can plan to improve in the next sprint/s.

4) Team feels free enough to share disagreements, this helps them bring up all the gaps they might see and feel empowered to share and address them as a team. 

5) SM should not sound equivocal at any point about the benefits of agile. Train/re-train/refresh your team on why you believe agile is the right way to deliver.


Previous post: 

Agile - Team fit

Agile- Everything gets stuck in testing

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