My customer is a team of one, which means that by the Scrum Guide he can’t be “doing Scrum”.  Whatever.  Scrum still has a lot to offer in his situation.

"Same procedure as every year, James."

My sächsische (Saxon) friends introduced me to the traditional New Year’s programme Dinner for One, in which elderly Miss Sophie’s loyal manservant James, due to personnel constraints, must attend to every detail of her 90th birthday party himself.

Last month, I visited a customer to perform NWC’s first official Scrum Health Check, a new offering I stole adapted from my colleague Martin’s blog post (“Are you doing Scrum? Really?“).  I sent lots of advance-prep materials and brought a beautifully-crafted checklist that I planned to use to determine their Scrum baseline.  But all that went out the window when I arrived onsite and found that my customer was a Scrum Team of One!

And then I tripped over a tiger

Me: First question.  Do you have Development Team(s) of 6±3?

Customer: Um, no.  There’s one other guy, sometimes, but we had this re-org and he reports to another manager now so… yeah, it’s pretty much just me.

Me: All righty!  Our Scrum Health Check is finished.  You are not doing Scrum.  Now, let’s talk about how you can use Scrum to make your… er, team… most effective in your situation.

And that’s what I’m about with Scrum.  Instead of throwing the entire Scrum Guide out the window, we kept it around and talked all day about the other Scrum practices my customer could use: in particular, we identified an ordered backlog and proper structure and focus for the biweekly Sprint Planning and Reviews/Retrospectives, to provide transparency and improve management buy-in.  These were his most urgent needs and we both agreed that Scrum could help—that’s why he picked it in the first place!

"Well, I'll do my very best!"

I consider myself fortunate to have arrived on the Scrum consulting scene right at the time when Scrum is making changes to become less rigid, less religious, and more widely useful (without diluting the structure that makes it so effective).  It would be a stupid waste (for all of us) to turn my customer away from Scrum just because he isn’t canon.