> When agile teams own their process they change it however they need. They are not forced to standardize with everyone else in the organization. And they are not forced to utilize any specific tool. [...] The most terrifying words in the English language are: I am Scrum certified and I am here to help.<p>Seems like the author is making a distinction between the good "agile" and the bad "Scrum". But that's barking up the wrong tree.<p>In theory, Scrum allows you to change your process (actually encourages! that's exactly what the retrospectives were meant for). There is no standardization with anyone outside your team in Scrum; and there are no specific tools mentioned in the Scrum Guide.<p><i>Yeah, that's the theory... but we all know that in practice, it doesn't work that way...</i><p>Ok, but why? To me it seems because typically the management tells you "yeah, the Scrum Guide (assuming they even know that such thing exists, which usually they don't) is just a theory, but in our company we do it our way!"<p>Now why do you believe that if you tell them "but we want to switch from Scrum to, uhm, a non-Scrum agile", suddenly the same managers will be like: "of course, no problem, let's uninstall Jira and delete all those meetings from the calendar, have fun!"?<p>When instead they can tell you "sure, feel free to switch to agile... but instead of the way it is described in the Agile Manifesto, we will do it our way... with meetings and Jira! Also, you need to synchronize your agileness with the rest of the company. And we are going to keep the product backlog, but feel free to suggest a better name for it -- something that will sound less 'Scrum' and more 'agile'."<p>And before you know, you are doing exactly the same thing as before, but everything has a cool new name. The meetings are called "interactions" (because "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools"), backlog grooming is called "customer collaboration" (because "Customer collaboration over contract negotiation"), you have complicated bureaucratic rituals for monthly, quarterly, and yearly "responding to change" (because of "Responding to change over following a plan"), et cetera.<p>Five years later, we will have everyone complaining about how "agile" was a stupid idea that makes everything worse.