A lot of the criticism here comes from people who had bad experiences with poor managers, leading them to reject the idea of work processes altogether.
The few defending Scrum are doing so based on positive experiences with great teams and strong leadership.
In my view, high-performance teams don’t just appear by "hiring good people and letting them do their thing." Good people naturally communicate, take initiative, prioritize, estimate, provide updates, and mentor less experienced team members. In other words, they often follow a pseudo-process or even suggest routines that resemble a formal process, if one is not already in place.
Alignment, communication, transparency, and prioritization are key to achieving results. Processes should be designed to support these, providing space for creativity and autonomy, including review and constant improvement of the process itself.
I think the issue with formal processes is that, while they are created to serve a goal, they very quickly become the goal.
When everybody in a room agrees that deviating from the process will improve the chances of success, but nobody in the room is empowered to approve the deviation, morale will drop quickly.
The few defending Scrum are doing so based on positive experiences with great teams and strong leadership.
In my view, high-performance teams don’t just appear by "hiring good people and letting them do their thing." Good people naturally communicate, take initiative, prioritize, estimate, provide updates, and mentor less experienced team members. In other words, they often follow a pseudo-process or even suggest routines that resemble a formal process, if one is not already in place.
Alignment, communication, transparency, and prioritization are key to achieving results. Processes should be designed to support these, providing space for creativity and autonomy, including review and constant improvement of the process itself.