One of my favorite cars that I ever owned was a 1967 Ford Falcon. I bought it for $600 when I was in college. It really wasn't much of a car. It was a 2 door coupe built on the same frame as the classic Mustang, but without any of those muscle car good looks. It was the kind of car intended to be a hot rod for my grandmother. It had a straight six cylinder motor combined with an automatic transmission that was best described as apathetic. It had all the fundamentals you need in a car: an engine, brakes, doors that open and close, and a horn that went "Beep! Beep!"
I remember the first time I stepped back and looked at it after I bought it and thinking, "Well, I'm going to have to change this right now." Of course, being a college student I had to do everything on the cheap. So I ran down to the auto parts store and bought a bunch of cans of spray paint. I taped up the windows and the headlights and proceeded to paint the entire car bright canary yellow. Sufferin' succotash! Was that car ever bright! Unfortunately, so was the car parked right next it (Oops). Then I bought a genuine race car hood scoop. You know, the kind like Mad Max had on the front of his car? Well, I grabbed a drill and bolted that baby right onto the hood (no, not the motor, the hood). That hood scoop didn't actually do anything but look cool (and act as storage for my friends used beer cans). Then I put some old fat used tires and some moon rims on the wheels and I had a genuine, bonafide, race machine.
Now granted, I really didn't change the motor at all. And those beer cans in the hood scoop rattled a lot whenever I turned sharply. After all, it was still just grandma's skinny little straight six. But you can't argue that I didn't have one of the most distinctive looking cars in SE Portland at the time. There was something empowering about being able to make any old cheap modification, large and small, just for the fun of it. So I just kept at it. Somehow I only managed to get pulled over by the police once - and that was for driving while simultaneously eating a very large bag of M&Ms. Guilty as charged: it was an "M&M DUI" - Driving Under the Influence of M&Ms. Yes indeed, those were wild days.
I still like to customize things. Whether it's cars, boats, or my house, I just can't seem to keep things stock. I guess I need to tweak it a bit to make it mine. Perhaps I need to fine tune things until they fit just right? And so it goes with some of the processes that we use. I don't think I've ever done Scrum the same way twice. And you can rest assured that I've never been able to implement a framework without bolting a metaphorical hood scoop on it or otherwise changing it to better fit the needs of the teams.
I don't really understand how people can refer to any framework as strictly "cookie cutter" or standardized. That just doesn't really match with my experience. You see, we always have to customize things. No matter how dogmatic we may be, there are difference issues and impediments that beg for us to make small changes. And that's OK, we need to be able to change things a little bit here and there. There are three reasons I believe that the customization of frameworks is important.
First, sometimes when you look closely at those frameworks you will find that there are multiple practices that can be used in the same place. I’m thinking of the myriad different ways that we can facilitate planning meetings for example. So you have a choice, you can use the stock practice as proscribed in the framework, or you can use a custom variety of your own. It’s kind of like customizing my old Ford Falcon and turning it into a hot rod.
Second, frameworks also have gaps. Again, close inspection of frameworks will reveal gaps in the recommended processes and practices. Not everything is completely spelled out, that’s why they call it a framework to begin with (there are bits that are intentionally left blank). It’s supposed to be skeleton upon which you hang your organizations processes. The processes that are already described are what many might call essential, but they are by no means all of the processes that you can have. You can certainly add more and you can certainly innovate in the way that those additional processes are integrated or combined with the framework. If you want to hang a stained glass window in the rear window of my Falcon, be my guest.
Third, frameworks are intended to serve as the foundation or soil within which the seeds of innovation can take root and grow. Most agile frameworks are all based on the underlying assumption that this is the starting point from which you will evolve. Over time you will either hang more processes off that skeleton or you will change the skeleton itself to better suite your business and technology domain.
It's only through customizing our frameworks using these tools that we achieve remarkable outcomes. Customization provides alternatives to stock practices that may grow stale over time. Customization can also help us to fill in the gaps in the process that were never anticipated when the framework was created. And finally, customization serves as the seeds of innovation that we plant in our frameworks in the hope of developing exciting new ways of working. We're here to build hot rods, not clunkers, so it's time to customize our frameworks.
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