Yesterday at 9:15 AM, a massive zero-day vulnerability was announced for our edge VPN concentrators. Active exploits were already in the wild. The vendor released an emergency patch that required a simple, five-minute reboot to apply.
The burn-rate timer hit $2,800 before we were "allowed" to secure the perimeter.
Here is what actually happened.
I immediately opened my terminal, staged the patch, and messaged the team that I was bouncing the primary VPN gateway. Before my finger could hit the Enter key, our newly appointed Agile Scrum MasterScrum MasterA meeting coordinator who asks you 'what are your blockers' every morning at 9:00 AM. interrupted in the enterprise Slack channel.
"Hold on," he typed. "This is Unplanned Work. It is going to completely ruin our Sprint VelocityVelocityA made-up number weaponized by management to make developers feel bad about their output. and wreck the burn-down chart."
Instead of letting me type the word reload and save the company from a massive ransomware incident, the Scrum MasterScrum MasterA meeting coordinator who asks you 'what are your blockers' every morning at 9:00 AM. spun up an emergency "Sprint Exception AlignmentAlignmentForcing everyone to nod on a Zoom call so no single individual takes the blame when it fails." Webex. He dragged the VP of IT, two product owners, and three senior engineers onto a 45-minute call.
We weren't discussing the severity of the vulnerability. We were actively negotiating which arbitrary 3-point Jira ticket we could "de-commit" and push to the backlog so that my 5-minute security patch could be officially added to the active sprint without altering our sacred VelocityVelocityA made-up number weaponized by management to make developers feel bad about their output. metrics.
The VP ultimately had to formally approve a "Sprint Scope Deviation" just so I could reboot a piece of metal.
We didn't practice Agile framework optimization yesterday. We spent nearly three thousand dollars in payroll prioritizing the aesthetic beauty of a Jira chart over the actual cybersecurity of the enterprise.
Total waste generated: $2,800.
Next time a Scrum MasterScrum MasterA meeting coordinator who asks you 'what are your blockers' every morning at 9:00 AM. blocks a critical security patch because it isn't in the active sprint, don't argue with them. Just minimize your terminal, accept the meeting invite, and start the timer.
