How avoiding robot teams helps you capture the true value of Scrum
Sidestep these six traps. #3 — Avoid the “meh” approach to Scrum Masters.
With all the misguided attempts at Agile and Scrum flying around, it’s easy to fall into the same common traps.
To capture true value from Scrum, you must modify your organization to fit Scrum rather than modify Scrum to fit your organization. Read that again. Most do the latter and wonder why Scrum doesn’t work.
If you are an Agile Leader, you must support your teams. To do this, you will need to change long-held beliefs in your organization running contrary to the Agile mindset. And trust me here, you will find many of these.
Watered-down Scrum results by not addressing the organizational obstacles impeding your teams. And the worst of these obstacles prevent the emergence of self-managing teams. Scrum has entered failure mode when you have robot teams, doing only what they’re told.
I’ve seen six common pitfalls you should sidestep to avoid creating teams of robots. If you can bypass these, the true value of Scrum awaits you.
Avoid specialized teams
Specialized teams incentivize hand-offs, dissolve control, and foster one-trick pony teams.
Here are some examples of specialized teams:
- Discovery teams
- Delivery teams
- Testing teams
- Front-end teams
- Service or API teams
- Data teams
- Support teams
When teams only own one stage of the value stream or one layer of the technology, they become a cog in the wheel. They can’t envision, design, create, and support the entire wheel. Robots that only do their widget or play their part are inevitable.
Scrum Teams are cross-functional, meaning the members have all the skills necessary to create value each Sprint.
The alternative: form a cross-functional feature team, owning end-to-end flow of value. Members of such teams further combat specialization by becoming generalized specialists. Each member brings deep expertise but adapts to learn other capabilities over time.
Specialized teams and team members delay value and squash team impact. Don’t fall prey to embracing them.
Avoid team puppet-masters
With Scrum, many managers and leads make a mistake — they continue command-and-control behavior.
Here are some common ways this manifests:
- Assigning work to team members
- Telling team members when to work
- Directing team members on how to work
This directive behavior saps the team of all decision-making power. The team no longer owns delivery of value; the manager or team leader does. And what remains are robots awaiting instruction.
They (Scrum Teams) are also self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how.
— The 2020 Scrum Guide
A better approach allows teams to manage themselves. Managers and team leads then can refocus their efforts on serving teams to enable their flow. This includes removing organizational obstacles teams cannot remove themselves.
You hired professionals to staff your teams. Give them space to manage themselves. And remove everything blocking their path.
Innovation and value flow better when you cut and discard the puppet strings.
Avoid the “meh” approach to Scrum Masters
The Scrum Master has a goal to maximize the team’s effective delivery of value using Scrum.
The Scrum Master is accountable for the Scrum Team’s effectiveness. They do this by enabling the Scrum Team to improve its practices, within the Scrum framework.
— The 2020 Scrum Guide
Well, that sounds hard, and it is. It becomes nearly impossible when an organization doesn’t value the Scrum Master.
My experience shows the Scrum Master to be an afterthought or recieve no thought at all. And when Scrum Masters finally come into the picture, they often lack experience.
Let’s face it, Scrum has exploded so fast in popularity we don’t have enough experienced Scrum Masters to go around. Many only have a certificate, a training course, and a new team. But this doesn’t mean the situation is hopeless.
The people serving as Scrum Master are not the problem. Their lack of experience or organizational clout inhibits their ability to enact change. As a result, they become enslaved to the existing status quo with no ability to alter it — a robot stuck in the system.
Those of us who are Agile and Scrum veterans must help this situation. We must elevate the Scrum Master and push for its prominence in the organizations we serve.
In a recent Agile Coaches’ Corner podcast, Vasco Duarte makes a compelling argument for Scrum Masters as the CEOs of the future. Serious Scrum’s Willem-Jan Ageling also makes an appealing case for saving the Scrum Master. This is the kind of thinking and support we need to build up the Scrum Master accountability.
It’s time to go from meh to wow with Scrum Masters.
Avoid cookie-cutter Scrum
Everyone wants a magic Agile or Scrum playbook.
But it’s wasted effort to create a standard playbook for today’s ever-changing landscape. Scrum supports the adaptation both of your product and how you work to deliver your product. Robots follow a standard playbook; humans adapt to their environment as it changes.
The Scrum framework is purposefully incomplete, only defining the parts required to implement Scrum theory. Scrum is built upon by the collective intelligence of the people using it. Rather than provide people with detailed instructions, the rules of Scrum guide their relationships and interactions.
— The 2020 Scrum Guide
A better approach allows teams to uniquely apply patterns, practices, and tools. Each team should inspect and adapt these within the Scrum framework to serve itself and its customers. When every team has unique methods to enable the framework, Scrum is doing its thing.
Happy teams and delighted customers result from adaptation, not standardization.
Avoid “chewing up food” for teams
When we treat teams like they are incapable, we rob them of their potential.
When given a recipe to follow, teams will follow it like robots. Their brains will turn off, and they will do as they’re told. And as a result, the opportunity slips by to tap into the power of many minds.
Chewing up food for teams manifests in many ways, such as:
- Having stakeholders decide in a vacuum what the teams will build
- Having a different group perform user research and user testing
- Having a separate, senior team or subject matter experts design a soluton for teams to build
- Having a standard way of working for all teams to follow
The Scrum Team is responsible for all product-related activities from stakeholder collaboration, verification, maintenance, operation, experimentation, research and development, and anything else that might be required.
— The 2020 Scrum Guide
A better way engages the team in all aspects of product-related activities. The groups who used to chew up food for the teams transition to coaching teams to chew their food on their own. This distributes knowledge and decision-making, building powerhouse teams.
Chewed-up food doesn’t taste good, so let’s stop serving it.
Avoid blaming
When we punish mistakes and assess blame, innovation dies.
Blame leads to fear and fear reduces transparency. Less transparency kills the empirical process. The status quo wins and we blindly follow, like robots, what we know won’t get us in trouble.
Transparency enables inspection. Inspection without transparency is misleading and wasteful.
— The 2020 Scrum Guide
A better approach embraces problem transparency and celebrates the resulting learning. When leaders create a safe space for problems to surface, they enable team experimentation. And trying new things avoids stagnation.
Enable innovation by embracing failure without blame.
Closing thought
You don’t want teams of robots.
What you need is self-managing teams, thinking on their own to adapt to changing contexts. These teams are free to make mistakes and learn from them without fear of punishment. Scrum is clear on the value of empiricism combined with self-managing teams. We should not ignore this guidance.
You don’t need specialized teams, which are controlled by a puppet master, staffed with an undervalued Scrum Master, using a cookie-cutter approach, served chewed up food, and fearing being blamed when they mess up.
Can you spot these six pitfalls and sidestep them? If you can, you will experience the true potential of Scrum.
Self-managing Scrum Teams will beat a robot army any day.
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