I admit to being wrong with my focus on how Scrum doesn’t prepare teams when it’s prescriptions don’t apply. But I’ve been seeing even more cases of when they do and teams flounder anyway
The challenges of not being able to write small stories, devs and testers working separately, unclear requirements, not finishing stories before starting others, ineffective standups and ineffective retro are all too common
10 years ago having stable cross-functional teams and working on sprints was a massive step forward since merely doing that resulted in a 3x improvement. Focusing on the framework and hoping people would figure out the rest made sense. But what is needed now is how to solve these common challenges
It is not hard to teach this, but it requires changing the content of a 2-day introduction to Scrum class to be tailored for the team being trained. Certification courses are often taught with a set curriculum and thereby providing you with 3 choices:
1) Take a CSM class and need a tune-up later (expensive and incomplete)
2) Take an Agile class tailored for your needs
3) Take a CSM class with an added day for the tune-up (expensive)
But cost is only one part – unprepared teams or an extra day of them not being available for work is more significant