“What trends do you see for Scrum for the next few years?“
Probably one of the worst things we can do these days is try to predict the future of something in an industry that has proven it needs to be disrupted. The work management industry, the one in which new work management systems are born, promoted, taught, adopted, and coached constantly… This is ripe for disruption.
But wait! Didn’t Agile disrupt this industry in 2001 with the Agile Manifesto (Manifesto for Agile Software Development, http://agilemanifesto.org)? Well, yes…and no. Agility had already been around for decades. Business Agility has it’s roots at least as far back as 1950. And, Lean (Lean Manufacturing) came on the scene in the late 1940’s or early 1950’s. And it also had it’s root back in the late 1800’s – early 1900’s. Lean and Business Agility disrupted Scientific Management (sometimes known as Taylorism).
This industry has already been disrupted several times…and I don’t think we’re even close to being done with that disruption.
It seems to me, as society and the regard we have for human life and general happiness changes, we regard work conditions differently. Because of this, we change how we manage the work. When we want to focus more on the quality of our output, we build mechanisms into our processes to ask people involved in the building of our products for quality improvement ideas. This causes a shift in how we work. When we realize our customers have a better experience with our products and services when our employees have a better experience with the company, we change our company’s values and principles to focus on those outcomes. This causes a shift in how we work.
I’m no fortune teller. So I won’t pretend to be one.
What I will predict is that societal changes will remain constantly changing. So, we will continue to shift how we work.
Will that include more use of AI? Will that result in more people working from home? Will that usher in an age of home-built products using inexpensive yet high-quality 3D printers and CNC machines? Will massive amounts of people realize that that can earn a living wage doing gig-work?
I don’t know.
I know that in the short term there will still be a need for Project Managers, Product Managers, Business Analysts, Business Systems Analysts, Engineers, Product Owners, and Scrum Masters (not too sure about the need for all the different names that Agile Coaches call themselves these days).
If forced to predict something about Scrum: I think the hard-and-fast ‘rules’ in the Scrum Guide are going to continue to soften, as they have been doing over the last 15 years or so. There aren’t that many left. I’d like to see rules around the structure of the Retrospective emerge. There are distinct parts to the Sprint Planning event. I’d like to see the Retro parted out to resemble the Derby-Larsen approach of the 5-phase Retrospective.
(Now some pessimism) By and large, though, what I think will happen to Scrum in the next few years is that large corporate entities will continue to dilute implementations of Scrum to further resemble what they’ve always done before, thus giving newcomers the idea that Scrum is a waste of time, or in the very least…useless.
