Just yesterday, my team officially agreed to discard the last vestiges of our ailing Scrum practice. (Corporate requires us to use JIRA, and JIRA forces us to o

Just yesterday, my team officially agreed to discard the last vestiges of our ailing Scrum practice. (Corporate requires us to use JIRA, and JIRA forces us to organize things into sprints, so there's that, but, even there, we've agreed to just do what we're going to do and pencil whip things to make JIRA happy.) I'm optimistic. The new plan is a loose high-level structure and a lot more room to experiment with our process and find what feels good. And a renewed commitment to do so. And a fresh morale boost. The transition will be difficult, but we will learn much and be better for it. I personally tend to defend Scrum as being overly maligned and often blamed for the consequences of misapplications. But that last sentence is a double edged blade. The truth is, the model is brittle and internally unstable, and it's difficult to get good results without constant vigilance to ensure the rituals are being performed correctly. (There's even an entire role just for doing that. It's the one with Scrum in the name.) And that's getting tricky in an increasingly distributed world. Online ticketing systems, for example, practically beg you to overload the tickets with extraneous clutter and paperwork that bogs you down. But you can't use the (greatly preferable, for Scrum purposes) sticky notes on a wall if you're not co-located. Story points don't work with distributed teams, either. They need planning poker (or similar) to function properly. But planning poker is exhausting, and videoconferencing is exhausting, and so nobody has much appetite or endurance for the exercise in self flagellation that is Zoom planning poker. So we all mentally and emotionally check out, which completely undercuts the effectiveness of the practice. Also, Scrum is just too meeting-heavy. We're spread across six time zones. We have precious few hours in the day when we can all meet with each other, and we simply can't afford to continue spending them all on so many synchronous rituals.