The SCRUM Sales pitches

OK, you guessed it, it was SCRUM.

Anyway, a consultant came and started coaching us.
Now, this was the beginning of the fun part, see, up to now no one ever treated a professional training as a coaching.
I must admit I got hooked quite fast, and if I recall the pitches I liked were:

The short blanket pitch
All our life we try to hold a too-short blanket to cover the triangle of features-time-quality.
Since management is great at demanding features and insists on delivery on time, quality suffers, (which effects the time of delivery finally as well...), so let's try another approach: to keep high quality, and deliver on time, let's loosen up the requirements! (we can't define the full requirements for a two year project anyway...)

The human factor pitch
OK, as difficult as it to admit, we are not robots, and we make mistakes, in estimations, in choices, and marketing makes mistakes in requirements. so let's take in small chunks.

The 'It's a give and take relationship' pitch
- We are responsible to make the estimates of the required development, and no one has the right to tell us we are over-estimating.
- We engage to deliver working software in a month.
- In return - requirements are frozen for a month.

The fun pitch
- Thou shall not stay late due to overload (unless you miss-planned), and thou shall learn your lesson if you do.
- The planning is done with post-its, all the development participates. lots of noise. lots of coffee.
- There is a five minute daily meeting, called a standup, we actually stand (and no coffee allowed), so as not to tempt us to babble in it.
- Every end of month (end of Sprint) besides a demo there are:
  - a retrospective; let's try to see what we learned from the way the sprint ran.
  - a celebration: hey! we spent a good effort (even if we failed miserably), let's have an hour of fun!

Given such strong sales pitches, seeing only benefits, and given the fact we had no say in it, we said yes.

And so the story began...

Till nextime!

The Scrum'em Bear.