Include management accountability.#34

Many Scrum teams lack leadership and management support where leaders are disengaged and think Scrum is a team-only thing. The result is often a bottom-up approach and conflict arrises when the teams are feeling things outside of their control is slowing them down. They often get shut down.

What we need is to clearly stipulate the business leadership role to

• Work with Scrum Teams to remove organisational impediments
• Create an environment that supports continuous improvement
• Empowers self-management
• Establishing and leading a culture that supports psychological safety through the Scrum Values.
• Empowers the Scrum Master to reveal impedements, and supports the teams decisions to improve
• Creates a space for learning and improvement, without fear.
• Works with the product owner and organisation to establish focus and reduce context sweithching
• Establish value flow and not utilisation and effort
• Create measures that align to deliving the product that can be used by teams
• Remove communication barriers and create open communication pathways
• Reduce unnecessary meetings, distractions allowing teams to focus on what is most important for the business.
• Help the team succeed, not manage from outside

Mangement and leaders play a vital role and often left with the “I don’t know what I must do” feeling. We need to help them help the team
succeed. This is done by giving them good guidance of what to do.

EDIT: This list is not immutable and feel free to write thoughts, add more, suggest changes. The intention of my to stop ignoring the management and help them lead and create a successful organisation that supports teams.

Not all Scrum Teams have to work with management. Scrum can also work in organisations without management or where management works in a Scrum team.

I voted yes.

For the specifics of your proposal, I’d change this, as it may suggest delivering the product on time is good enough. Maybe delivering value or delivering a valuable product?

“Create measures that align to deliving the product that can be used by teams”

@Willem-Jan Ageling : I never worked in an organization without management., did you? I think that’s an obscure reason to not add it.

@Sjoerd Nijland : curious to hear your perspective on why you voted for no.

@Willem-Jan Ageling , every businesss has some form of business owner or executive so the accountability is from that business pont of view. As with all roles and accountabilities, if a team does not have a particual person as as you said “Not all Scrum Teams have to work with management”; those accountabilities don’t dissapear. They can reside in the team. Just like current Scrum, e.g. A single person can be a Scrum Master and a Developer. So nothing stops them taking on that accountability. This does not mean those accountabilities disaapear, they still exist and someone has to have their finger on it.

@Maarten Dalmijn , I am not precious about the name and the content of that role. People are more than welcome to ammend, alter them. I am not precious about the wording either as I am not the best writer in the world :)

Anyone, please feel free to contribute to a management/leadership accountability of what you think is needed.

Good point @Brett. I agree the role of management is important. It’s my most important objective in my company, coaching them to embrace their role.

A
Management is often control so slowing down and irritating the team’s performance

In my opinion, theres nothing preventing someone from creating a supplementary set of practices and tools that would help leaders support Agile or Scrum teams more effectively.

An example of this is writing a book called the Agile Leadership Toolkit.

@Richard Brillantes , I agree with you that it should be supplementary in a world where people do the right thing. The reality is more often than not, management don’t support teams and see Scrum as a team-only thing. That common problem needs to be addressed explicitly imo. I would love nothing better for management to do it without being asked, but that is not what happens in the market.

Agreed. A relevant gap in Scrum is who decides the composition of a Scrum team. Self organization presumes the team exists in the first place. Management must support Scrum teams to ensure their success.