Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?
Suggested Solution:
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv’s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, “why” gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams
One Response
A very relevant article, that tries to address some of the core barriers to adoption of Agile in an organization.
Also, apart from the organization culture, one might need to look at the core beliefs of the individuals involved, as at the end of the day, there are many subconscious influences acting upon each of us whether we realize it or not.
For example, are each of the individuals in the team following any mental and physical hygiene practices that makes them more flexible and adaptable to adoption of change. Similarly, in the Indian context, even if the organizational culture is collaborative or innovative we still tend to be hierarchical by virtue of our tradition, so a mixed approach may be always called for.