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Value of ScrumMasters

ScrumMasters are the most misunderstood role in Agile space. Organizations often take them as assistants of the team, like some expensive administrators. They let them update tasks and schedule meetings, and they believe that’s it. However such work seems to be important from a traditional point of view where we need to allocate tasks to individuals and handle dependencies, in Agile it’s not much needed, because of a regular cadence of events and team ownership and responsibility for their work and the value they deliver. When we accept that ScrumMasters are not here to become team assistants, what are they doing and what is their value to the organization?

The real goal of ScrumMaster is to create self-managing, cross-functional teams, constantly look for improvements, help teams to become better, and eventually hyper-performing. It’s a leadership position. They don’t micromanage what individual team members do, but instead, they create an environment where teams can flourish by facilitating the conversation and collaboration and by coaching them for improvement.

Many ScrumMasters got it and focus on helping their teams to become great. But unfortunately very often they forget that the ‘My Team’ level of the #ScrumMasterWay concept is just the beginning of their journey and can only create a limited impact on the organization. Now don’t take me wrong. It’s a good start. But it’s only a beginning. Once they learn how to build self-managing teams from groups of individuals, and how to make them cross-functional, it’s time for them to shift to the ‘Relationship’ level of the #ScrumMasterWay concept and focus on the broader ecosystem. Help the Product Owners to work differently with their stakeholders and build more value-driven backlogs, create value streams in the organization, initiate the shift from projects to products, work with management on goals that would be more team-oriented over individual-oriented, and introduce some meaningful scaling approach to help the organization to reflect and be better at delivering value for the customers and achieving some real business impact. Because at the end of the day, no one cares if you use Scrum, no one cares which agile scaling framework you implemented. The only thing that matters is if you could help your organization to become more successful, create some impact, and bring a return on investment.

And ScrumMasters who are only active on the ‘My Team’ level of the #ScrumMasterWay concept can only create a limited impact on the organizational business. Working at the ‘My team’ level is more like a kindergarten for ScrumMasters. So grow up, and help your organizations to become successful.

Agile is in the first place about change, so don’t be afraid to change the status quo, don’t be afraid to challenge people. There is a sentence you should never say as a ScrumMaster. “It will never work in this organization”. Everything is possible. If you believe it and you are not afraid to go for it, you’re going to be a great ScrumMaster, and your organization would appreciate what you’re doing. Remember that success scale, not Agile. So stop focusing that much on different practices and start focusing on creating an impact on the organization and helping your organization to see it. And that requires a significant change at the ‘Relationship’ level and eventually, the ‘Entire System’ level of the #ScrumMasterWay concept.

The hot topic of the next few years will be leadership

Modern world brings not only the different way of developing software called Agile but also changes in the organizational structure and leadership. You see it more and more often. People at the classes are asking why their managers are not there to hear the message. But very often they are, and they are ready to change the entire organization and their leadership style.

The ‘Shu’ level of Agile transformation is focused on practices and individuals or teams. How can we start? As a result, we create small isolated islands of Agility where we get to experience and learn more about what does it mean to be Agile. Sometimes companies are looking for shortcuts. But you can’t skip this level. It’s your foundation. If you make it solid, you are more likely going to be successful with Agile at the organizational level. At this level, you might see some improvements, but can’t achieve greater efficiency across the whole organization.

The ‘Ha’ level of Agile Transformation is when you start Scaling phase. This is where the Business Agility starts to take place. That’s where the different leadership starts to be critically needed as you have to grow the different structure and mindset. The key focus is shifting towards how to develop leaders and how senior employees are growing within a company. As the right culture is getting its place, people are coming with innovative creative ideas which can make a difference in the company results. This situation is currently the biggest challenge we are facing now as an industry and its topic of many discussions. Together with Scaling frameworks (like LeSS – Large Scale Scrum) which address the organizational design, we talk about different Agile management practices, Agile HR, Agile in marketing, Agile in finance. Companies that understand this can create an environment that is more efficient, productive, and more successful than anything we have ever achieved with classical management methods.

Finally, the ‘Ri’ level of Agile transformation starts when the Business Agility is the normal way you operate your business. We have individual Agile leaders in the organization, and people take over initiatives. This is a time for another organizational shift. At this stage, we have a true Agile executive team, focusing on long-term strategy and Agile Board of Directors focusing on the purpose and vision both working as teams collaborating together. Both truly living Agile values.

Emerging Trends in Agile

The world is changing in cycles, fashion goes in cycles, and the same is true for Agile. What was trendy yesterday, is not today and it can change surprisingly fast 🙂 So let’s have a look what are the new trends in Agile and what the Agile community is talking about:

Agile Leadership and Agile Organization

Agile is not just a set of practices how to write a good software, but it’s more and more used in every part of the organization. The traditional leadership (leader-follower model) is no longer acceptable in Agile environments. In the previous years, almost everybody focused on teams and how to adopt Agile, Scrum, and Kanban to the teams. But if we want to be successful at the organizational level, this is not enough. We need to push boundaries and help the whole organization to change. Hand in hand with that, we need to grow Agile leaders and support Agile leadership which is the critical key to the organizational success with Agile.

Agile out of IT

As it was already mentioned, for real success, it’s important to change the whole organization into Agile. The common practice is to change IT department and leave it as isolated island inside the traditional organization. But this is just the beginning. The company has to follow the same culture and the same style of the working, so you hear more and more about Agile in HR and talent management, Agile finances, Agile marketing etc.

Business Agility

Finally, there is a term of Business Agility which brings back the real value of Agile. Agile was never meant to be development process of your IT. It was supposed to be business value driven. It should bring the startup mindset back to the organizations, and look at the delivery from a business perspective. Prioritize, deliver value in short cycles, get feedback, measure impact. This is the real Agile mindset.

If you are in Agile or do you plan to try and implement it focus on these topics because without it Agile become only an empty skeleton of practices and processes. Agile is organizational change, it changes the mindset, culture, leadership, and business focus. If you take it as such change, you are going to be successful with Agile.

Agile Adoption Story – Common Mistakes (part 6)

And finally, to finish the agile adoption story, even though the team is after all able to find their way to communicate, share knowhow, learn from each other, and cooperate, there is another obstacle. Surprisingly it’s not outside the company but in the business unit internally.

Company doesn’t need to change

The company doesn’t need any change. It used to be working good for many years, and if we had observed any problems, they were indeed located in the ICT, so why should we change the business unit? Isn’t Scrum called software development methodology?

Oh, yes, Scrum is business driven, but here are the requirements, so take them as they are and if you need to make any User Stories out of them, sure, feel free to do it. But we are not really interested in your internal processes so don’t bother us. However, we expect you to finish all this work on time.

So the teams are desperate again. Unless they got Product Owner, who is willing to become part of their team, and share the risk and success with them, they can’t proceed with real Scrum. They can’t take all responsibility and gain success in return.

Unfortunately, some get frustrated from the lack of business support and still complaining “Agile is not for us”. We are different, we have too complex product, we are too big/small to implement agile. Our customers are like this and that, and you know, agile is great, just for a different company.