Agile project management needs to be aware the power of dark scrum. Scrum is an agile methodology for managing development projects — mostly software projects but increasingly used in other fields needing flexible and innovative project management solutions. Working in small increments of time (sprints), the scrum teams deliver in predetermined increments, with measurable goals and the flexibility to learn and pivot on the fly.

Scrum goes dark when agile flexibility and teamwork are undermined unreasonable expectations, creating dissension among team members and stakeholders, and turning quick, agile moves into awkward stumbles.

“Well, to me, dark scrum is a dysfunction that is readily identified by looking at morale,” says Ron Jeffries, one of the creators of Extreme Programming (XP), one of the authors of the influential Agile Manifesto and the expert who coined the term “dark scrum.” “It’s caused, primarily, by pressure from management or the ‘product owner’ (or any powerful person) to deliver more, faster. . . .”

Read about how to identify dark scrum in project management, and how to deal with its effects, in a blog post I wrote for monday.com, a developer of work collaboration and management solutions.