What our platform team learned when sprint planning met production work.
By 15:17 on Thursday, six of the nine cards we had promised for the sprint were still open, and the one everyone wanted finished was waiting on a DNS change from another team. Our board looked less like a plan and more like the contents of a drawer after someone has searched for a battery.
We’d been running Scrum with the infrastructure group for four months: eight engineers, one engineering manager, a rotating facilitator, and enough Kubernetes work to make estimates feel mildly dishonest. We kept the ceremonies small, used two-week sprints, and made every operational interruption visible instead of pretending PagerDuty events arrived from another department.
That last part mattered. So did admitting that some things people say about Scrum are true only in the same sense that “the lift is working” is true while it is stuck between floors.
“Scrum Makes Delivery Predictable”
