I am now a Certified Scrummaster which means I have done the formal Scrum training and have certified that I lead the team using the official and recommended techniques. During the course I was happy to see that we at Magic Milestones already follow the Scrum techniques closely so there was not a lot of new ground to cover. However, hearing the other course attendees describe their workplace environments, usually in the context of explaining why Scrum isn’t working so well for them, I was a little bit disheartened about certain trends. Because Scrum teams are self-organising and the teams make their own decisions there is a bit of a trend to not use Project Managers in the Scrummaster role and to use developers or tech leads instead. The main role of the Scrummaster is to remove impediments and obstacles to the team’s progress. In order to do this the Scrummaster needs to be empowered in the organisation so that they can suggest the changes that are often required in order for goals to be met. This is where I see the huge value in having a professional Project Manager in that role - someone who is experienced in working with top management and implementing organisational change to support the project and who is empowered to do so. If a developer or tech lead is empowered and experienced in these things then having them as Scrummasters is all well and good but if they are not, and if they are not interested in that element of the role, then the situation can arise where Scrum is shoe-horned into less than ideal situations.

By empowering teams to be self-organising and making their own decisions you can certainly get great software results and team cohesion. However, you can’t always get a team that is capable of changing processes outside their immediate area, such as integration testing or other third party dependencies, so that timelines are shortened and goals met. In the Scrummaster course there was a lot of discussion about when is a task ‘done’. It seems that in a lot of organisations it is hard to get to ‘done’ due to dependencies on other teams such as a QA team or processes that create delays before a developer can say that their task is ‘done’. An empowered and experienced Scrummaster should be able to suggest and implement process changes to remove these delays and integrate with other teams or dependencies. If the Scrummaster role is being performed, on a rotating basis, by developers or tech leads rather than managers with experience in process change then I think the team will struggle to get to ‘done’. Becoming self-organising doesn’t remove the need for management.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 10:04 am by cindyedmonds and is filed under Agile, Project Management, Team. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.