Agile
Four Unbalanced Accountabilities That Can Hurt your Scrum Team
Nov
Four Unbalanced Accountabilities That Can Hurt your Scrum Team
via Scrum.org Blog by Fabio Panzavolta
Scrum requires a self-organized team to deliver “done” increments at the end of each Sprint. This peculiarity sometimes raises criticisms and questions when it is discussed in training or when coaching the clients: how can a team work without a leader? How are we going to do our job, if no one tells us what or how to do it?
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The Scrum Guide states that:
“Scrum Teams are self-organizing and cross-functional. Self-organizing teams choose how best to accomplish their work, rather than being directed by others outside the team.”
Self-organization will lead to performing Scrum Teams; the Scrum Master has to ensure that Self-organization is understood and correctly used. He helps each individual to contribute to this objective.
I believe that to allow a team to self-organize, you need a mix of faith, trust, and courage:
- Faith in Scrum: thanks to the high frequency of inspections and adaptations, people will be engaged in improving their way of working
- Trust others: their good faith! Because every human being that has a clear goal wants to do his or her best to accomplish it
- Courage to let it go: let people take the time needed to experiment and understand. Being available to each other to help each other, to point out any behavior that does not favor self-organization
During years of teamwork, I observed the following unbalanced accountabilities. This list is not meant to be exhaustive or in a particular order. I’m interested to know if someone has lived the same or similar situations.