Four Unbalanced Accountabilities That Can Hurt your Scrum Team

Four Unbalanced Accountabilities That Can Hurt your Scrum Team

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.

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