>developers being empowered to work on what's most important at the moment
There's the problem, the "moment" is the sprint. If you're need for a flexible time frame is less than a week then Scrum isn't going to work for you. There are other methodologies that might work (Kanban say), but I'd also question whether you're doing pure development or mixing in support as well.
> "Project Managers" don't exist in Scrum.
> Right. Just project owners. Uh huh.
"Product Owners" should never, ever, ever be Project Managers or anything like them! They're supposed to be from the business end of things. The worst projects I've ever seen in Scrum land have been developing for project manager's needs (the only time PMs get to be POs) and it went horribly because they act like project managers not business people focusing on what they actually need the product to do.
If your consultants are confusing Kanban and Scrum then I'd run screaming for the hills. I've literally just come out of a retrospective where we had a discussion about switching from Scrum to Kanban for a load of impact analysis heavy work, they are different beasts both good at different things.
> "Project Managers" don't exist in Scrum. > Right. Just project owners. Uh huh. "Product Owners" should never, ever, ever be Project Managers or anything like them! They're supposed to be from the business end of things. The worst projects I've ever seen in Scrum land have been developing for project manager's needs (the only time PMs get to be POs) and it went horribly because they act like project managers not business people focusing on what they actually need the product to do.
If your consultants are confusing Kanban and Scrum then I'd run screaming for the hills. I've literally just come out of a retrospective where we had a discussion about switching from Scrum to Kanban for a load of impact analysis heavy work, they are different beasts both good at different things.