We ran a certified ScrumMaster training in a very nice atmosphere near Mechelen, Belgium. Together with Prosource, Mechelen, we again delivered a training that the participants really liked. I was especially happy because at the end of the training most people said they now understand that cherry-picking from Scrum does not work. They said they want to go back to their organizations and want to convince people to follow Scrum “by-the-book”.

This is really one of the important things you need to get!

“My advice is to do it by the book,
get good at the practices,
then do as you will.
Many people want to skip to step three.
How do they know? ” — Ron Jeffries

I believe Ron Jeffries is right. And we all know that we first need to learn something. In this stage we are happy that we do it fairly correct. But the next stage is, when we feel right with this, to run our implementation a bit differently, here we will find ways to adapt it to our needs. And the last step will be when we do what works. Everything becomes natural.

1. Shu (守:しゅ, Shu? “protect”, “obey”) — traditional wisdom — learning fundamentals, techniques, heuristics, proverb.

2. Ha (破:は, Ha? “detach”, “digress”) — breaking with tradition — finding exceptions to traditional wisdom, reflecting on their truth, finding new ways, techniques, and proverbs

3. Ri (離:り, Ri? “leave”, “separate”) — transcendence — there are no techniques or proverbs, all moves are natural

— Wikipedia

When I started doing Scrum, I a;lso did cherry-picking. We did “Scrum-like”. Only when I came back from the first agile software development conference in 2003, in Utah — when I met Alistair, Ken, Kent, Ron, Jim and more — I understood that we need to do all practices and apply all principles. When I came back from Utah, I did Scrum by the book. And … we succeeded. We outperformed ourselves every Sprint.

So – in retrospect I can only say – I learned that cherry picking brings some value, but not the whole picture.