Kevinjohn Gallagher

After months of study, a week of courses and more exams than I care to recall, I am very pleased to be known as an officially Certified Scrum Master and Certified Agile Project manager.

It’s so nice to be able to add those titles to the CV, but that’s not the reason why I chose to become certified. I wanted to do the courses and see what my version of Scrum was in comparison to the official vision. And boy was it different.

Nigel Baker, of Agile Bear, described it as “Scrum-ish” which certain felt like a good description of the process I’ve been using in the last 2 years. Over the week’s training he tried to instill in us the strengths behind the idea of Scrum and the failures of Scrum-ish. In a theoretical sense the philosophy behind the methodology seemed sound, and resonated with me a great deal. Yet, there was a nagging feeling that I couldn’t quite put my finger on until the last day.

As we spoke more about Business Change/Transformation and how Scrum can fit into existing business models I realized that Scrum based projects only appear to offer value if certain criteria exist. In the digital field, and especially in the agency world, these requirements are almost never met – and it’s a very rare case that more than 1 is met. I’ve been brain storming this for the last 3 weeks, and discussing it with some of my fellow CSMs, and there seems to be no way around the “Scrum-ish” model for the majority of Agency sized projects.

As someone who really hated the cumbersome Prince2 management Methodology, I have to say that it’s stood me in good stead over the years – especially in its ability to be scaled down when needed. Scrum doesn’t quite appear to have that ability, which surprises me. Maybe that’s a topic for another day…