People are celebrating and enjoying the 28th anniversary of Scrum, mostly with many successes and evidence about how it supports agility, leaving limited space for the other side of the coin, including but not limited to:

• As a process framework, Scrum violates the first and fourth values of the manifesto; individuals and interactions over processes and tools; responding to change over following a plan,
• As an “indivisible” whole of practices, Scrum does not let self-organizing! teams self-organize especially when the results are out of the guide,
• As an “indivisible” whole of practices, implementing Scrum comes with a large bunch of changes at once like in the waterfall methodology, which contradicts the experimental, iterative, and incremental development nature of agility
• Scrum is experiencing “deadlines” of fixed iterations and the planning phenomenon not in a heavy but sharp and rigid way.
• …

For possible solutions to such issues, Necmettin will provide suggestions for Scrum based on Lean Thinking and Kanban in particular, including but not limited to:

• internalizing a continuous X mentality (such as in continuous planning, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous flow)
• end-to-end pull system
• focusing on whole value streams and system thinking
• managing dependencies through a network of services across the entire organization
• adopting Shu-Ha-Ri and Lean LEGO philosophy
• ...

Scrum can be better than some “others” or “the best way to do software”, yet it still has some ways to go ahead. Necmettin does not intend to classify Scrum as good or bad, adequate or inadequate; on the contrary, he aims to support Scrum by providing solutions to its shortcomings, as the name and spirit of agility demand such an attempt.

About the speaker:

Necmettin Özkan has first-hand professional experience in IT quality, process, and performance management, Agile Software Development, and agility. Among the frameworks, he closely works with ITIL, COBIT, Scrum, and Kanban. Necmettin is passionate about contributing to the body of knowledge by sharing through public speaking, organizing events, as a lecturer at universities, mentor and reviewer for international journals and conferences, and with academic publications. He is working toward his PhD degree at Gebze Technical University in Agile and as an R&D, Quality, and Process Team Leader in a bank. Nowadays, he is deeply interested in agile mindset and real agility.