Spikes And Stories

Scrum tips and agile insights from a Silicon Valley agile coach

Breaking the status quo as Scrum Master

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Editor’s Note: Tanner here. I’m usually the one doing the writing but not today.  I ran into Sjoerd a few days back.  Awesome guy, great writer, and he has some refreshing perspectives on agility and Scrum Mastery.  Also, he’s been gratuitous enough to share his thoughts on my blog with all of you today.  For more from Sjoerd, click here.

Hey Scrum Master!

Here is to you, the battering ram, breaking through barriers that are barring your team from awesomeness.

It takes a lot of courage to be touching the raw nerves, to address the elephant in the room, to being radically transparent and enabling continuous improvement.

Introducing Scrum will involve dragging the company through its own dirt, exposing toxic politics and power plays. These invoke emotional reactions.

So how do you, as Scrum Master, keep breaking the status quo, without being a constant pain in the ass to your colleagues?

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Is Your Scrum Adoption Stalling?

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I often get asked what to do when a Scrum adoption begins to stall.  This is especially true to those in the earlier stages of adoption.  Whenever these conversations occur, it inevitably leads to the same answer.  I can’t help.  I just don’t understand your context or your organization.  Don’t misunderstand.  I want to help, but what can I do when I’m not beside you seeing what you see and hearing what you hear?

Today, I have an idea.  I emphasize questions over statements so it’s time to practice what I preach.  After all, it’s you who has all the answers, not me.  My role today is think through questions I’d ask myself if I were in your shoes.

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Practical Advice for Managers in an Agile Shop

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In my last blog post, I wrote about the side effects of manager as Product Owner.  In it, I talked about how I believe these roles should be filled by different people.  So if the manager isn’t directing the work, what’s s/he doing? How does a manager help his/her people when they’re distributed across multiple teams?  The Scrum Guide is silent on the topic, and although I offered up some of my own opinions in Managers in an Agile Shop, I didn’t offer much practical advice.  Let’s fix that.  Today, I’ll bias my advice toward the actionable, and I think it all can summarized in these wise words by Ed Catmull:

It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks.  It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.

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Why Manager as Product Owner Will Usually Fail

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The Scrum Guide doesn’t talk about the role of managers.  So does that mean that one day we have managers, and then as soon as we begin an agile transformation, they suddenly disappear?  Of course not.  So what do we do with them?  Many organizations use managers to direct the work of their reports so it could seem reasonable to assign these managers as Product Owners.  I can see the logic in this, but a younger me would have opposed this with extreme prejudice.  A younger me would use all my persuasive might emphasizing how this isn’t the right thing to do.  But why?  What’s wrong with it?

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