1. Scrum Will Not Solve Your Problems

Some people hope that Scrum will magically solve their problems, as if it were a silver bullet. But Agile processes like Scrum are more like a mother-in-law looking over your shoulder all the time: they point out all your problems and mistakes, making them transparent. In the end, you have to solve them and do the hard work yourself.

2. Scrum Offers No Benefits When You Only Follow the Process

I have seen teams that did Scrum exactly by the book. They had daily stand-ups, Sprint Planning meetings, Sprint Reviews, Retrospectives, and even Product Backlog Refinement meetings. However, the benefits they reaped from Scrum were minor because they missed the point that Agile is more about being than it is about doing. Becoming Agile requires a mindset change to accompany the process change. Only by embracing the 12 principles behind the Agile Manifesto and the Scrum Values will Scrum unfold its full potential.

3. There Is No “Scrum Switch”

Sending all your employees on a two-day Scrum certification training is not nearly enough to make you a Scrum company. There is no switch that you can flip to “Scrum” to make your company Agile overnight. Descriptions of the Scrum process make it seem easy, but the opposite is true: adopting Scrum is hard. There is much to learn: maximizing the work not done, eliminating existing meetings, delivering production-ready versions of product every Sprint, tackling tough organizational issues, and more. Yes, you can “switch” to Scrum, but it will be a gradual process—it takes months or even years and is ultimately a never-ending story.

4. Transforming to Scrum Means Transforming Your Organization

Most Agile transformation initiatives start in product development, but they should not remain there. If the rest of your organization happily ignores the initiative, it’s like planting a flower in the desert: it will slowly die. There is no way to introduce Scrum without transforming the organization, in whole or in part. If you are not ready to face that, you are not ready for Scrum.

5. Scrum Is Not Faster

Even though the term “Sprint” implies that Scrum is fast, reset your expectations, at least at first. If you want to have production-ready releases at the end of every iteration, you won’t be able to deliver more in the same amount of time. Scrum will actually help you decrease your time to market, but in different ways:

• Scrum is about gradually increasing the work not done. Focus on what your customers really need rather than building cluttered products that nobody knows how to use with features nobody needs. This, of course, leads to shorter (and clearer) Product Backlogs and faster delivery and thus ultimately to a better time to market.

• Scrum is about building in quality right from the beginning. It will help you create room to focus on creating innovative features rather than wasting time and energy on everlasting bug fixing. Also, the time you’ll need for maintenance will decrease tremendously.