In a recent client engagement I witnessed scrum-gone-badly-wrong. It happened underneath the department manager in the line organization of a large corporate (

In a recent client engagement I witnessed scrum-gone-badly-wrong. It happened underneath the department manager in the line organization of a large corporate (not project manager, line manager). He managed about a dozen people doing about a dozen projects at any one time. A project was usually staffed by one person working it fulltime, and drawing support from the rest of the group here and there. The manager held a daily standup involving the whole dozen people. With everybody doing a five-minute status report on their project, that meant five minutes of speaking time for everybody and 55 minutes of sitting through status reports on projects that you had zero involvement with, where you couldn't possibly have anything useful to say. I suggested numerous times that it would be better to have devs have a 1-hour blocker in their calendar without an actual meeting. They would do an e-mail update, and if the manager saw the need for any clarification he could use the 1-hour timeslot to turn up at their desk and talk 1-on-1. It would have been so much more efficient, but the manager didn't go for the suggestion. Paying lip service to the scrum quasi religion, the manager repeatedly emphasized that the point of the standup was not to check on people's productivity or make them face repercussions for not meeting daily commitments. But he never missed an opportunity to make a passive-aggressive joke when a dev's productivity was called into question. Like a dev might say "I thought I would be able to do X yesterday, but didn't manage, because problem Y turned up. I solved Y, but X is still not done". The manager might jokingly say something like "Well, I hope you enjoyed your beachtime and will be able to finish X today." So not funny. I'm thoroughly convinced that shaming people was the method he was using to pressure people into doing overtime or otherwise doing whatever was necessary to meet daily goals every day, and that that was the real reason he wanted the whole department in the room. Because shaming is so much more effective when you shame somebody in front of a lot of people than just making a bad joke in a 1-on-1 situation.