Just out of interest, what do you think happens when the high-ups of an organisation go all out for Agile and Scrum when in fact it's the last thing the organisation needs?

I used to work for the UK regulator of qualifications. Now, as you might imagine, that organisation has to handle and store an awful lot of data. Millions of students take GCSE and A-levels every year. Millions more people take Vocational Qualifications. Data floods in from schools, FE colleges, training organisations, professional bodies and Awarding Organisations. It arrives in many forms from printed lists through Word and .pdf files to immense spreadsheets - few if any of which are in any kind of standard template. So all of it needed to be sorted, put into a single format and standard templates, then stored where it could be readily accessed by the various teams that use it.

So it was decided to build a data warehouse. In orfer to do this, the IT manager created an Agile/Scrum project and the results where just what was required, in a remarkably short time.

At which point all the Directors got over-excited and decreed that from that day forward, all teams were to use Scrum for everything!

Now the teams involved have titles like Standards, Comparability, Recognition, Accreditation, Policy, Research, Finance and Operations (admin to anyone else). The only things they 'produce' are reports and lists. But now, every report etc had to be a 'project', done in two-week sprints, with all the boards, stand-ups, reviews and retrospectives thereunto pertaining. Plus a low-grade officer from Operations (an Admin Assistant) as Scrum Master.

I'd be interested in your ideas as to what ensued.