Don't marry a methodology

Methodologies are tools and should serve you, not the other way around

I have to confess that every time I hear someone saying they need to hire a Scrum Master, I am a bit judgemental. Not that I dislike Scrum, I actually think it is a nice tool. The issue though is that I think each team is made of different challenges and individuals, and I do not think one methodology is the best for every single team out there.

When I think methodologies, I think of them as tools for management. There are methodologies or frameworks for everything under the sun: how to see a career as a leader, how to structure feedback, how to organize goals and objectives, how to track progress, how to run a company, how to dress for work. You name it.

There's one book about management that really stuck to me, because I think it talks not directly about this, but in touches this point in general. The book is: First, Break All the Rules, by Marcus Buckingham. It is about a study on what makes a good manager. Read the book, it is great. I will break some hearts here, but I was not surprised when I read that what makes good leaders is not about how they applied the Agile or OKRs methodologies.

Spoiler alert: the thing in common amongst the great managers they researched was that they did not follow a prescription, or a given recipe. They broke rules, adapted to the people and the situation in front of them.

Making an analogy, picking a methodology to live behind is like picking a solution without knowing what the problem is yet. It is waking up with a hammer on your hand, but not all things that will show up for you to resolve are nails.

I see teams self inflicting pain to bend their work style into rigid adoption of methodologies with the illusion that it will give them extra productivity. It won't. You risk stopping to work for the company you work for, and starting working for the Methodologies’ God instead.

So whenever you step into a training for a new methodology for anything: project management, people management, whatever, please think about it as one more tool in your toolbox. Do not ditch all others, they might be useful for you in the future.

Not everything can be solved by a “Birmingham screwdriver”.