How do you balance following the process with staying pragmatic?

Question

Accepted Answer

The goal is **value, not process compliance**. Scrum and Agile practices are means to an end; a senior practitioner applies them where they help and adapts where they don't — without sliding into "we skip the parts we dislike," which usually masks avoidance of hard discipline.

## A judgment framework

```text
ASK FOR EACH PRACTICE:
- What problem does this practice solve for us?
- Are we getting that benefit, or just performing the ritual?
- If we change it, what risk does removing it create?

KEEP the discipline that protects value (DoD, retros, feedback).
ADAPT the ceremony that has become pure overhead.
```

## Concrete example

A mature team finds the formal Daily Scrum redundant because they pair and chat all day, so they shorten it to a quick board check — but they keep a rigorous Definition of Done and never skip retros, because those directly protect quality and improvement.

## Common pitfalls

- "We're too senior for process" — often a cover for dropping useful discipline.
- Rigid, by-the-book Scrum applied with no thought to context.
- Changing practices without naming what problem the change solves.

## Why it matters

Process exists to serve outcomes; clinging to it blindly and abandoning it carelessly are both failures of judgment.

Senior practitioners are trusted precisely because they can tell which disciplines are load-bearing and which are ceremony, and adjust deliberately.