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I was a newly hired Director of Engineering a company that drank the Kool-Aid of Agile and had an independent team of Scrummasters who just facilitated morning
by agrippanux 2y ago
I was a newly hired Director of Engineering a company that drank the Kool-Aid of Agile and had an independent team of Scrummasters who just facilitated morning stand-ups. They had no project management responsibilities, so I kept asking what do they do all day after the morning stand-up and no one could answer me. I got severe pushback that they should take on any set of greater responsibilities.
I founded several new teams at that company and was approached by the head of the Scrummasters to integrate with their process. I flatly said no, I don't need your services, I've been running teams for 20 years and I'm good. It became this huge blowup that went all the way up the chain of execs until a compromise was reached - I had to accept Scrummasters for my teams but I could direct them to do nothing except basic JIRA ticket shuffling.
Fast forward a few years, I've left that place, but my teams became the centerpieces of the company and all new teams are now modeled after them. The Scrummaster team was cut in half.
The best part is my team structure is closer to the spirit of Agile with self-organizing teams empowered to operate how best suits them and the Scrummaster team was forcing rigid ceremonies that were at best time consuming and at worst completely useless.
- mytailorisrich 2y agoI've always interpreted the 'scrum master' role as the person on the team that is both the process expert and senior enough to be able to generally coach others and help unblocking issues. Ie. one of the senior devs on the team that has been interested enough to learn the scrum agile process, but who takes on the role can change depending on circumstances. But obviously this means it's not a dedicated role and so a missed 'opportunity' to create more "manager of something" roles, especially for project managers who feel threatened.
- AwaAwa 2y agoMore responsibility for the same pay, corralling people, and inevitably adding their workload to yours? Because SME/mentor < sr dev when it comes time to rightsize the CxOs gambling losses. Not surprising sr devs weren't jumping on this whole hog.
- mytailorisrich 2y ago> More responsibility for the same pay, corralling people, and inevitably adding their workload to yours? That's perhaps what you would do to your team but that's not what I suggested in my comment. > Not surprising sr devs weren't jumping on this whole hog. Senior devs interested in growing beyond pure dev do jump on this opportunity and job satisfaction an retention increases.
- TrueGeek 2y agoI've worked on a team that did it like this but every sprint a different member took on the role of Scrummaster. I thought it worked out well.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]