Ken Schwaber is able to express a lot in few words. His take on the Project Manager versus Scrum Master debate is a case in point:
“The Project Manager, less his or her responsibilities that the Product Owner (business value management) and Team (self management) perform, is now the Scrum Master, who has the additional duties of making Scrum work within the Team and the enterprise through leadership, coaching, and facilitation.”
Even so, in some environments where management determines that Teams are not yet able to self-manage, the Project Manager role is left in place. This ‘ScrumBut’ tactic causes confusion; even in an Agile work place working for two bosses is still never a good idea.
What is a ScrumBut? Schwaber explains: “Many organizations have adopted Scrum. However, when they use Scrum, they run into ScrumButs. ScrumButs are reasons why they can’t take full advantage of Scrum to solve the problems and realize the benefits. An example ScrumBut is: The Daily Scrum meetings are too much overhead because the team members don’t need to meet so often, so we only have them once a week, unless we need them more often.”
Have you introduced any ScrumBut roles in your organization? If so, please share them with us: How you identified them, measured their impact, and what plans, if any, you have for replacing them?
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
ScrumBut role: Product Owner on the conference line.
How many teams are remote from their PO? How does having a remote PO facilitate customer collaboration? So many of the Scrum teams I’ve worked on had remote POs (or perhaps the team was outsourced from a consulting/professional services company like ours). Therefore the customer collaboration that leads to highly performant teams [yes performant should be in the QED] is diminished. I’ve also worked on teams with SMEs or POs involved in the daily life of the developers and seen the difference that customer collaboration makes. You can not push collaboration through a digital phone line (not even with video).