Didn't Scrum fail?

It is factually incorrect to say that Scrum failed if it was practiced in name only. We doubt you will find a Scrum master who would say "The team practiced Scrum proficiently and lived Agile principles, but they decided to abandon it." The truth is

• Scrum is hard to practice with other tools.
• Agile principles are sometimes blocked by corporate leadership and culture. Mevali cannot help if an organization is spiritually Waterfall and claiming Agile. However, if a company uses Mevali, you can bet they truly want to live Agile principles.

Let's break down the procedural failure points that Mevali fixes.

The events are boring, performative, and not actionable

Quite frankly they are often soul crushing, when they were designed to be invigorating and inspiring.

Standup is supposed to be about collaboration but almost always devolves into everyone going around and giving a status report or justifying their employment. While not true to the spirit of the process, it happens more often than people want to admit.

• If you want to keep the team format for standup, Mevali will show most, if not all, of the status report information, which alleviates the need for a book report each morning.
• If you want to manage the work instead (preferable), the Work tab shows the team exactly where there are impediments, aging, or at risk work. Then the team spends standup navigating the sprint together.

And if you want to skip Standup altogether in favor of immediate DMs, great! Go for it. You might be missing an opportunity for the team to surface blockers at a determined point and decrease the risk of interruptions and context switching.

Grooming meetings often involve minutes of the facilitator fighting with the UX which is why a lot of Scrum masters encourage using a physical whiteboard and not a software tool. Mevali provides a real-time collaborative surface and a Work Breakdown Structure that is so easy to manipulate that grooming remains a fluid and engaged process.

Planning and commitment meetings are also both boring and often used as a tool of shame rather than team empowerment.

• Mevali's Monte Carlo simulation and statistical analysis improve your chances of delivering without the false precision of a Gantt chart, and with better outcomes than simply comparing a number.
• Mevali's user outcomes focus gives executives something more meaningful to consider when reviewing team output than just story points.

Retro is the most performative in our experience. At the end of every sprint the team gathers around and opens the notes from the last retro for the first time since the last retro! No one thought about process improvements during the sprint and no one recorded any metrics or artifacts to justify a claim that a process succeeded or failed. Mevali makes retro process improvements and ideas visible during Standup and at any point during the sprint.

We deploy constantly, so why use Sprints?

That conflates release cadence with team cadence. Continuous integration and deployment govern how finished work is validated and reaches users; a Sprint gives the team a period to focus on a Sprint Goal, then inspect the product and improve how they work. A Scrum team can deploy many times during a Sprint!!! We know that a lot of companies consider them synonymous with release cadence but that is a failure of realization and not of Scrum. The Sprint Review is not a release gate, and continuous delivery does not eliminate the need for shared goals or regular adaptation. A Sprint just declares a period of time the team will focus on a goal and after which consider how they might improve.

Stories are underspecified

Teams benefit from stories that have a Who, What, Why and Acceptance Criteria. Other products provide a big blob of Description text which is stifling for the product owner (blank canvas syndrome) and often leads to underspecified work.

Decomposition is a HARD in other products

Scrum masters implore teams to decompose larger work to improve agility, transparency, deliverability, and more. However, doing so in other products is both HARD and clearly a second class citizen.

Before AI it would take minutes to use Jira or Azure DevOps or others to decompose a Story into an Epic of Stories and then set up all of the dependencies and blockers between those stories. AI alleviates the pain of that _initial_ decomposition but…

• The context of the larger work is buried in the UX, so teams lose visibility. It feels like the Story is the thing and the Feature is some distant relative.
• The initial decomposition is rarely the end of the story. Changing dependencies remains a nightmare. Changes in decomposition are also difficult. It often happens that a product owner brings a decomposed Feature to the team and the team discovers that the split was less than ideal considered along domain or technical seams, so the work has to be re-organized. Other products don't have a solution for that. In Mevali it is a few drag/drop operations and maybe a click or two.