Barry Overeem: Zombie Scrum: The #1 Strategy to Prevent or Fix It
Scrum on the outside. No heartbeat inside.
“Zombie Scrum” is Barry Overeem's name for teams that look like they're doing Scrum on the outside — ceremonies, roles, artifacts all present — but lack a beating heart of valuable software underneath. It's a phenomenon many Agile practitioners will recognize immediately.
Barry walks through the telltale symptoms: no contact with stakeholders, no working product, no drive to improve, and no autonomy. His number one strategy to prevent or fix Zombie Scrum is “Strategy Knotworking,” a Liberating Structure that involves the whole organization in shaping the future together by collaboratively answering six core questions covering purpose, context, challenge, baseline, ambition, and action.
What You'll Learn
- How to spot the telltale symptoms of Zombie Scrum on your own team
- Why ceremonies and artifacts alone don’t guarantee real, valuable software
- How to run “Strategy Knotworking,” a Liberating Structure that rebuilds purpose and ambition
Written by Ayush Bisht · Reviewed for accuracy by Sanjay Saini
Key Takeaways
About the Speaker
Barry Overeem is co-founder of The Liberators and Columinity, where he creates content, delivers training, and facilitates Liberating Structures workshops for Agile and Scrum teams worldwide. He is known for his work identifying and resolving “Zombie Scrum” and is a Professional Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org. Barry Overeem spoke at Scrum Day India 2020 on “Zombie Scrum: The #1 Strategy to Prevent or Fix It.”
Presentation Deck
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