My clients get some very strange ideas about how to choose sprint length. Some seem to think it is extremely important that all the Scrum teams at their company do sprints of the same length. They might even go so far as to make all the teams start and end their sprints on the same day.

In short, yes - absolutely. This is a common question I get from my clients. “We used to have weekly status meetings and now, with Scrum, we have them every day. Can’t we skip a few or just do twice weekly?” When I get a question like this, I can tell that the person asking doesn’t understand the purpose of the daily Scrum. And I will admit, when I was new to Scrum (having come from the world of project management) I fell into this too.

Are there ever times when a waterfall approach to managing projects is a better choice than Scrum? This might surprise you, since I am a Certified Scrum Trainer, but I actually think there are times when a waterfall approach to project management works fine.