Dealing With Cowboys

"The coolest thing with Scrum," he said, "is that you can get rid of your long requirement phase and start deliver at once. You can also throw away your copy of MS Project. You don't have to create any big design documents or spend time in test phases any more. Release monthly and get paid earlier!"

Confused stares.

"Doesn't that sound great?" he continued excitedly.

More confused stares. Awkward moment.

"What's going on here?" he thought.

Muffled laughter.

"But we aren't doing any of that," the manager responded. "It sounds expensive and wasteful. Besides, we already release several times a week. This Scrum thing seems pretty pointless to me."

Long pause.

"I trust my tech lead and it looks like he was right again: We are already doing it the best way possible. We won't be needing your services. Thank you for your visit."

What's going on here? Is Scrum guy wrong? Who laughed? Why?

Anchoring Leads to False Commitment

The product owner asked the team to estimate a bunch of tasks, and began by saying something like:

This next task, make us a thingamabob, should be real simple for you guys to implement. You being experienced with this and all.

My spider sense went out of the roof at this point. I had a hunch how this might end, and just watched the play unfold. The team suddenly looked uncertain and everyone went quiet. No one spoke. Instead, people looked at each other waiting for the other guy to respond. Eventually the manager said:

Hmm, it ought to take you just a couple of days, three tops, to implement, but just ignore me.

Ah! So the team conversed shortly and somewhat hurriedly came up with an estimate of two days...

Can you see anything wrong with this?