We have a scrum board and everything. I trained a colleague and stuff was starting to work out.  

You should know we had plain chaos with people shouting and the alarming question why it isn't finished yet. Clearly it was development that had no clue or was either incompetent or lazy or maybe just both. 

The truth was a history of 3 years of technical debt and technical analyses with details like: Wants the product [X] yes [] No.

You'd then have customers outraged by development not delivering what sales has promised. But what did they promise? 

Sales would just promise that it would be finished in 3 days. They even promised an integration with a automated telephone dialer. Now don't get me wrong, I like a challenge. But telling people you'll fix it in 3 days just doesn't make things fun anymore. 

 

So we introduced user stories and tried to bring in estimates. Well at least more accurate ones than everything costs 3 hours.

Another simple rule of thumb is, you stick to a planning. You can't change the running direction every 5 seconds. So the scrum master defends the sprint and all of that classic logic. 

 

Sadly the CEO, which happens to be the sales lead would not take no for an answer. So what we had was a struggle of several months. Surprise bugs coming in and sprints being hijacked by what sales thinks we should be doing every 5 minutes. 

So my newly trained scrum master quit. 

We are back to DO MY BIDDING NOW mode. Well that was time well spent.