Do you like plain Vanilla SCRUM or Flavored :) ??

This cartoon by Mike Vidoz made me write this post. ( Im a fan of his SCRUM toons :)-But I wish if he has new cartoons coming up more often ;-) ) And if you want to know which SCRUM I like, I like strawberry toping SCRUM. :) yummieee..

Plain Vanilla SCRUM is the SCRUM we all learned.. Simple, Nice, appetizing.. and I loved it more than anything I have ever learned about project management due to its simplicity and the way of getting away from Micro Management and Command and control management which sucks in my words. I think that’s why most skilled people got really attracted to SCRUM.
However when we put it in to practice, we learned a lot. SCRUM as it is … Is it enough? No I don’t think so. Mainly because SCRUM is only a PM framework , still even with some missing pieces , It address the fact that how teams should work in order to deliver results more effectively by cutting many unwanted stuff on the way. But when you do it in practice, you need to think about agile project initiation, Risk handing (SCRUM reduces project risks to a greater degree..but it’s hard to believe that SCRUM itself reduces all the risks involved in a project), transparency to higher management who is responsible at last to the customer and specially about addressing the engineering principles needed to be taken from XP or from any other agile method.
Recently I saw a good blog post written by Jesse Frewel in his blog about complains on initial version of SCRUM and the modifications which have happened. I see may people in the industry add many features to SCRUM after they start practicing it for a while.

I read another awesome article by Martin Fowler and he wrote about “Semantic Diffusion” happening to agile, He has a bliki and not a wiki .. You can find it here.. http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SemanticDiffusion.html Its worth reading.. !

Only thing what you got to be careful is, no matter whatever the customization you do or add new things to SCRUM framework , you got to understand that the key is not losing the agile concepts. If your new flavors added to Plain Vanilla SCRUM kills the agile concepts, then it will not deliver the expected value of practicing SCRUM. So be careful when you add things over it .. Make sure it gives you the right flavor :)