What Scrum Guide didn't tell us
According to the 16th State of Agile Report, almost 9 in 10 respondents claimed that Scrum is the most commonly applied agile framework on team level.
What is Scrum?
Scrum is the world-leading Agile development method, commonly applied by Fortune 500 companies and other organizations. Scrum exists to transform the way people tackle complex projects, bringing the Scrum framework and Agile principles beyond software development to the broader world of work.
It is a lightweighted framework with 3-5-3 as rule of the game, described in the scrum guide.
3 Roles: Product Owner, Scrum Master & Team Member
5 Events: a fixed duration called Sprint (normally 2 to 4 weeks), Sprit Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review & Retrospective
3 Artifacts: Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog & Product Increment
Why is it called as "Scrum"?
When Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwab co-created the Scrum in 1993, they borrowed the term "SCRUM" from an analogy put forth in a 1986 paper by Takeuchi and Nonaka, published in the Harvard Business Review (link here). In that paper, the authors compare high-performing, cross-functional product development teams to rugby teams, the formation when players are set before restart play. Scrums involve eight players from each team, who bind together and shove against one another. the ball gets passed within the team as it moves as a unit up the field.
“The traditional sequential or “relay race” approach to product development […] may conflict with the goals of maximum speed and flexibility. Instead, a holistic or “rugby” approach — where a team tries to go the distance as a unit, passing the ball back and forth — may better serve today’s competitive requirements.”
Source: Takeuchi and Nonaka, (1986), “The New New Product Development Game”, Harvard Business Review
During the Scrum product devleopment process, the knowledge spiral emerges.
What is a Knowledge Spiral?
Despite the widely recognized importance of knowledge as a vital source of competitive advantage, there is little understanding of how organizations actually create and manage knowledge dynamically.
Nonaka, Toyama and Konno start from the view of an organization as an entity that creates knowledge continuously, and their goal in this article is to understand the dynamic process in which an organization creates, maintains and exploits knowledge, consisting 3 elements:
(i) SECI process, knowledge creation through the conversion of tacit and explicit knowledge:
(ii) ‘ba’, the shared context for knowledge creation;
(iii) knowledge assets, the inputs, outputs and moderators of the knowledge-creating process.
The knowledge creation process is a spiral that grows out of these three elements; the key to leading it is dialectical thinking, in the language of agile manifesto: individuals and interactions.
In this article let's do some reality check, in comparision to Scrum Guide.
Scrum Master - Easy to Learn, Hard to Master
It is so easy to download a scrum guide and pass an scrum certification, afterwards, is your scrum master work like this?
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or like this?
As the co-founder of The Liberators, Barry Overeem, has written a white paper in 2016 on "the 8 stance of a scrum master": as a Servant Leader, Facilitator, Coach, Manager, Mentor, Teacher, Impediment Remover, and Change Agent.
In reality, the 8 Misunderstood Stances of a Scrum Master, considered as a The Coffee Clerk. a Scribe, a Secretary, a Scrum Police, a Team Boss, an Admin. the Chairman, A Super Hero, or "It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s the Super Scrum Master!"
Think about the competences that a scrum master needs to possess:
Empiricism, Scrum Values, Scrum Team, Events, Artifacts, Done, and Scaling, Self-Managing Teams,?Facilitation,?Leadership,?Coaching,?Mentoring and Teaching, Forecasting & Release Planning, Product Vision, Product Value, Product Backlog Management, Business Strategy, and Stakeholder & Customers, Emergent Software Development, Managing Technical Risk, Continuous Quality, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Optimizing Flow.?Organizational Design and Culture, Portfolio Planning, and Evidence-Based Management...
The list goes on and on.
Product Owner - Mastery art of balancing, it's about value
The Product Owner accountability is described in the 2020 Scrum Guide as follows.
The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team. How this is done may vary widely across organizations, Scrum Teams, and individuals.
In reality, the environment can be quite complex and messy, as Product Owner it can often feel overwhelming, like thousand hands Guanyin (aka. Avalokiteshvara, 观音), the tenth-level bodhisattva associated with great compassion and empathy, originated from South East Asia, the thousand hands emerged in order to aid the suffering reduction.
The most important quality of a good PO, is to have empathy and able to navigate through complex stakeholder structure, and reduce the suffering of product development for customers and developers.
As a good product owner, he/she needs to manage complex stakeholder expectations, bringing the expertise of UX, Technology, Product, Marketing, Business Strategy, Finance... trying to find the balance among dozens, sometimes hundreds of parameters, if not thousand, trying to fix different things together to make it work.
So is your product owner working like this?
Or rather like this?
According to Chris Lukassen and Dave West, depending on:
Product Owner's role can be very different, but what value ‘is’ depends on the situation and context; however, a Product Owner always strives to maximize it. Sometimes this means prioritizing direct customer value; sometimes, it is all about risk (or anti-value) and meeting those needs. It may be long-term value described by strategy or immediate value defined in defects.?
To summarize,
there is more than meet the eyes in Scrum Guide, Scrum is not a cookbook ‘process’ with detailed and exhaustive prescriptions for every imaginable situation. Scrum is a framework of principles, roles and rules that thrive on the people doing Scrum. The true potential of Scrum lies in the discovery and emergence of practices, tools and techniques and in optimizing them for each organization’s specific context. Scrum is very much about behavior, much more than it is about process. (Gunther Verheyen, 2013)
It takes years to become good at it, but worth the effort, through exploration, practice and discovery of how to becoming better, for customers, colleagues, and ourselves.
Source: scrum.org, Robbin Schuuman, Barry Overeem, Dave West, Gunther Verheyen