Zombie Scrum and The Scrum Guide — Part 1

I came across the term “Zombie Scrum” recently and it seemed something very familiar. On the outside, Zombie Scrum looks like Scrum with all the ceremonies but it lacks the heartbeat. Scrum is followed as a process rather than a philosophy.

Although the whole Scrum Guide is less than 10 pages but often ignored and Scrum is only limited to terminology and events. In this post, I will look at the symptoms of Zombie Scrum and link them back to The Scrum Guide (2020 edition). I will pick statements from different parts of Scrum guide and map them to symptoms of Zombie Scrum to demonstrate how deviation from the Scrum Guide takes away the heartbeat from Scrum. I will focus on the Scrum Theory section of the Scrum Guide in this post.

“Scrum is a lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems” but in Zombie Scurm, the framework is often made heavy while putting very little focus on the value.

“Scrum is founded on empiricism and lean thinking.” but in Zombie Scrum, lean thinking often takes the backseat. Teams often act and function like project teams with heavy project management processes introduced around Scrum. Sprint Reviews are not considered sufficient and often status update meetings are scheduled to demonstrate work progress.

“Scrum employs an iterative, incremental approach to optimize predictability and to control risk.” but in Zombie Scrum, there is very little focus on predictability. Sprints are used for corporate time boxing rather than a delivery window. There is very little intention to incrementally build the product.

“Scrum combines four formal events for inspection and adaptation within a containing event, the Sprint. These events work because they implement the empirical Scrum pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation.” While the Scrum Guide puts a lot of emphasis on transparency, inspection, and adaptation, there is very little focus on these pillars in Zombie Scrum. Work is often carried out in silos by individuals with no transparency. the purpose of understanding the progress is focused more on status updates rather than understanding how it adds value to the end result. Work products are often defined vaguely to avoid transparency. Inspection is more focused on finding bugs in the work product with no effort made to understand the root cause. Inspection and adaptation are focused on the work outputs rather than on the process used to produce the output.

Basic symptoms of Zombie Scrum can be cured by understanding the Scrum Theory and the Scrum Guide. I will continue this series in future posts where I look at other sections of the Scrum Guide and how Zombie Scrum ignores or misinterprets them.