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by Michal Nowak

Have you heard about Scrum, but…? This means "we do scrum, but…" we don’t do retrospectives, don’t do daily standups, etc. Well, there’s a deep wisdom behind all the Scrum practices we give up. Be aware of the risks you create and know how to counteract them. This is a first post in a series that aims to show how you can keep the benefits of Scrum in real life.

It’s not always practical to implement Scrum in full. We’ve all been there. We may be in a hurry and rush the planning session. Or there’s only part-time, inexperienced Scrum Master. Or our client keeps changing the scope of our sprints. That’s often the reality. But remember one thing. With every aspect of Scrum you don’t do, there’s benefits you loose. Up to the point of failing the project.

Note: In this article series I strive not to use Scrum jargon as the lessons from it can be applied far beyond Agile projects.

Scrum Is Funky & Feels Like Extra Effort

Scrum seems to require a lot from us. It comes with funky vocabulary: sprints, planning poker, retrospectives, Scrum Masters, etc. But it’s worth it. I worked on projects that implemented it correctly and magic happened! If you’ve participated in a well-led, agile project then you know what I mean. But there’s a caveat to this productivity nirvana: it only works if go all-in on Scrum OR your team really, really, REALLY knows what they’re doing.

Why there's such a tremendous value behind Scrum? Because it takes into account communication issues. It was invented to handle the mess at the intersection of software projects and reality. Finally it accounts for the human psychology. It provides tools & feedback loops to counteract the negative effects of all these. When you divert from Scrum, you're on your own in dealing with all those aspects!

Lack of Retrospectives

In my experience, this is the single most important part of the Scrum process. That’s when the team sits down to discuss what went well and what wasn’t working during the last sprint (recent period of work). It's key to improving the way teams work. Here's an exaggerated (or is it? 🤔) reason why it's so important: Increase vs. decrease the performance 1% each day for a year. That's the result you'll get.

Benefits of retrospectives

Risks Of Not Doing Retrospectives

Counteractions / Remedies

If you can’t do proper retrospectives you need to ensure there’s a way for the team to identify problems and improve. You can do it in different ways. You may have regular 1-1 meetings. You can still do retrospectives, but more rare. The team can appoint someone to look for bottlenecks and then to coordinate improvements. You can provide slack (unallocated) time the team can use to improve their way of working.


As you see making a simple list of what went good and bad can go a long way. Retrospective is when you uncover problems. This is how you remove frustrations of the team. This is when you tap into their knowledge and their perspective. This is how you improve performance. This is how your team grows.

PS. If you're interested why Scrum scrum works and why skipping its elements is so risky you may want to read about the PDCA (plan–do–check–act) cycle.