The "Double Standard of Scrum" Myth

I frequently hear the following concern about Scrum from developers considering it:

"We hear one of two things about Scrum. Either Scrum was successful or if the project using it failed, it did so because they weren't using Scrum correctly."

This double standard creates justified skepticism on their part. This is a reaction to the Silver Bullet Myth.

My response is that Scrum can't be blamed for failure or even credited with success. Teams succeed or fail due to many factors: technology, capability, vision, communication, collaboration, talent or even the underlying idea of the game. Scrum creates transparency into how well these elements are working, often in a measurable way, but that's all. It doesn't prescribe what to do when sprints repeatedly show the game isn't fun or the velocity of the team is low. In some cases, the best you can hope for is to "fail fast".

Success is challenging. The reason is that everyone shares the same goal of success and that raises the bar. It demands talent, passion, diligence and focus if you hope to make a better game that will stand above in the competition to capture sales. For this reason, there will never be a predefined process for creating successful new games.