No Vacations in Scrum

I was at a kickoff meeting for one of our officially endorsed Scrum projects this week when a sort of strange question came up from one of the business owners:

So no one wants to get assigned to this project in my group because if you’re on a Scrum project you can’t take vacations.

This was pretty easily dispelled with an explanation that vacations are allowed including surprise things like people getting called out for jury duty. Basically backed by two of the Agile Manifesto Principles:

  • People over Process
  • Responding to Change

It does however exemplify some of the rumors that crop up when you start a new process like Scrum. The biggest thing that shakes up a lot of our organization is the idea of collocating and the idea of dedicating staff 100%. My sense is it’s turf protection stuff, but it could just as easily be fear of the unknown.

Technorati Tags:

,