Scrum was hit by the perfect storm - WFO and AI
Explained with the Theory of Control
Work-from-home (WFO) is here to stay. It turned our industry, many companies and many technology departments upside down. Despite Return-to-office (RTO) policies, WFO is too convenient for your life to go back to work, when the company wants you to (at least when you’re on Makers schedule not manager schedule.) It’s something different when you go back to office because you want to go to office that day to meet some people, but that’s not what the company with hybrid means, instead it means three defined days per week. Which is not coming back.
Working at home has made all of us Zoom junkies. We’re in Zoom calls over and over again. And what everyone recognized, remote video meetings in Zoom are tedious and draining. We don’t want to do them and especially not several in a row or several a day. Developers especially want to code, not videophone.
“Zoom fatigue is tiredness, worry, or burnout associated with the overuse of online platforms of communication, particularly videotelephony” Wikipedia
Scrum has many meetings, some shorter and some longer. The long meetings are draining (even without Zoom, but moreso with Zoom), and the short meetings often break down on video (Daily Standup), because there is no physicality and physical interactions with a board involved, and watching other people on video is boring.
In the Theory of Control all these meetings are called control elements, because they control the work elements like Developing (Find an introduction to the Theory of Control here).
With AI our productivity as developers increases tremendously. Some say by 50%, some say 5x. Either way, Coding Agents and AI IDEs make developing a feature much faster than before. And if we speed up, the control elements are limiting our gains. When I’m done faster, I need to ask the product manager for input sooner, and more and more often. Which limits me.
The control elements are bad for WFO and are bad for AI. Scrum has many control elements, one might say Scrum is defined by its large amount of control elements (Sprint Planning, Backlog Planning, Daily Standup, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective) compared to it’s work elements (Only one (!) - Developing).
I have been with Scrum for nearly 20 years. It was a great process to get people started on processes and bring order to chaos. It worked ok for some time in the internet era but overstayed it’s visit. With WFO and AI , Scrum hit the perfect storm. Because of it’s many control elements, Scrum is unfit for our current time and the age of remote work and AI - and will go away fast.
