Obviously that monster was not what anyone intended by agile, yet the trappings of scrum slot neatly into what the organization actually wanted. Interchangeable workers, a progress chart to show the SVP, enough hipness to sound like the management isn't to blame.
Except it's not 10 minutes a day. It's like a half-hour a day because, "Oh, it's 10 minutes to scrum. I can't finish this task in 10 minutes. I'm going to go get a drink of water and talk to John by the water cooler until scrum." + the one person at scrum who explains everything they're doing in detail because they never learned to summarize so it takes longer than 10 minutes + 10 minutes afterwards because, oh look, it's almost lunch time and I can't finish anything up in 10 minutes.
> an hour every other week for retro
Plus the after-talk that people do with each other about things like, "I don't think they really understood my point about our dev tools being a problem," or whatever things didn't or couldn't be said in the actual retro.
> a half hour every other week for showing the work to the stakeholders
Except that the stakeholders never show up on time so you end up waiting around for them, and they want to ask inane questions for the next few hours...
it never ends.
I mean, I don't love SCRUM, but I don't understand everyone talking about how much overhead it is.
That said, learning the process can take time - early grooming sessions can be terrible. However, on an experienced (in SCRUM) team in a functional organization, it doesn't take much time at all.