Everything needs to reflect to the team's needs. I'm a very big advocate of scrum, but I rarely have my teams run pure scrum. One thing I absolutely love is int

Everything needs to reflect to the team's needs. I'm a very big advocate of scrum, but I rarely have my teams run pure scrum. One thing I absolutely love is introducing the concepts of sprints and watching conversations switch from bickering about single day deadlines on a multi-week project to "sounds like it'll take X sprints". There are essentially two times you should try to follow scrum perfectly: * During a fire/emergency. This should be rare. It helps keep the response moving without unnecessary overhead. Yes, the meetings are overhead - but they often cut out other other head. * When gelling a new team. Scrum is really helpful in getting the team to mesh quickly. Routine contact, flexibility, small iteration, all good stuff. Outside of that, roll scrum back to match the team. For us, that's: * Bi-weekly retrospectives. * 1 to 3 standups per week (depending on the team's need) ----- Basically, we ask for 4 hours of people's time over 2 weeks. We find this ends up saving well over 4-hours of 1-off and random meetings.