This is your first project using Scrum framework and someone announces (normally in one of training you receive before you start a project using Scrum framework), “Scrum teams are self organized, empowered and self-managed”. The first thought that goes in most of the people head, what exactly it means, especially if you have been following traditional waterfall methods all along your life. You ask to explain this statement bit more to the trainer and trainer explain that most of the decisions are taken by team rather than management. Now, you are bit confused (or grinned if you are a developer). The main reason of confusion (or grinning) is that nobody explains how it’s going to work in reality. Each member of team start thinking what does this statement means for them?
Let’s try to scan few people’s brain and see what’s going on their mind when they hear this statement.
Project Manager’s brain! What does it means? Scrum is a project management framework and supposed to solve project management issues. What is supposed to do with team’s self-Organisation, self-management and empowerment? I am the one who is responsible for the delivery of this project so how come team can be empowered to take decision. Development team will manage themselves, you must be dreaming! Sounds familiar PMs?
Architect’s mind, what’s bull%£$t? Are you serious? Are you telling me that these so called developer and QA team will decide how the solution would/should be built? You must be joking aren’t you? These people have always worked what I have told them, so how can they be empowered to take those (architectural) decisions. What about sign off process? Who will take ownership of decisions? I told you earlier, this whole Agile thingy is not going to work. I settle my case now.
Development/QA Manager’s mind, hmmm! I have no idea what does it means to my role. If team are self-organised, self-managed and also empowered, what am I going to do? Does it make my role redundant? Grrrr, I am not comfortable with it, so I should show resistance.
Developer’s mind, really? I mean do you really mean that I would be able to take those decisions that I never agreed with my PM, Architect etc. That would be awesome finally to take my own decisions. I am in dude!
Do you see a pattern here? I hope you do and if you have spotted it you are right. None of these people thought that they are part of ‘the team’. They all thought that they have some individual responsibilities but no collective responsibilities.
That’s the beauty of most of the Agile methodology and frameworks specially Scrum. Scrum has only three roles Product Owner, Scrum Master and team and together they are one team. So first thing that we must understand that ‘team’ includes everyone i.e. Architect, manager, QA, developer, DB architect, technical writers, customer etc. We all need to work together to achieve one goal; i.e. Deliver working software every sprint as per customer demands. Once we understand the concept of team, it’s easy to understand empowerment, self-organisation and self-management.
Now let’s go through Empowerment, self-organisation and self-management and understand what it means in reality.
Empowerment as per dictionary is “to give power or authority to; authorize, especially by legal or official means”. In Agile, the team has power or authority to take its own decisions to improve the quality, process and practice for the solution that they are working on. So for example, it’s up to team to decide what are the best development processes for them so that no unnecessary organisation processes are imposed them to create un-necessary bottleneck or overheads. The real advantage of empowerment gets realized when team starts using Inspect & Adopt process (using Sprint Retrospective meetings in XP/Scrum) and initiate improvement activities. Team should be empowered here to take those actions rather than going through a sign off process and someone else decide what actions needs to be worked and assigned them to individuals. This kind of behavior kills the momentum of drive to continual improvement.
Please note that empowerment also brings accountability along with it. So when teams are empowered they are also accountable for each decision they take that results in success (or failure) of a project/product.
Empowered teams become self-organised very quickly. Team starts owning actions and start interacting with each other to complete those actions. As I stated earlier accountability comes along with empowerment that helps team to become self-managed also. Self managed teams don’t look outside the team to decide or take decisions to drive improvement. They are motivated enough (through ‘empowerment’) to own the product and work towards continual improvement.
So as a Scrum Master, emphasize the importance of a team before start working on empowerment. Discuss principle and values behind agile teams i.e. trust, openness, integrity, transparency, courage etc. Once you have a team empower them to take their own decision but with active coaching (not managing). Also note, it can take up to 24 months before teams become fully self organised and self managed.
