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Scrum makes the distinction between supporting the team in WHAT work they do and HOW they do it. Trying to have one person play both of these would create a great deal of conflict. How do you choose in a stressful situation between negotiating features or helping the team grow and reach consensus. A scrum master is a facilitator, how can he/she facilitate if ...
24
Why can't the scrum master and the project owner be the same person?
It's simply the conflict of interests and focus. The project owner's main focus is on the success of the project, and make it happen, however the scrum master's main focus is on the team and its development. Two different things which cannot be done successfully by one person at the same ...
21
TL; DR
Your question embeds some false assumptions about the linear nature of testing within an agile process. A mature agile team with cross-functional skill sets treats development and testing as intertwined activities rather than as sequential ones.
You should strive to integrate development and testing so that they are not fundamentally separate work ...
17
If you throw 10 random people together and assign them a complex, challenging task, with no other direction than 'go', these individuals will naturally evolve and gravitate to certain roles. This is a very natural phenomena and is defined by Belbin and others. Even if there is conflict with a certain role, it works itself out as the team gels with little ...
17
The Scrum Master is responsible for creating an environment in which the team communicates honestly and transparently and delivers to the best of their abilities. This also provides data on which the Project Manager can act.
The Project Manager is responsible for the success of the project.
Some projects should not be successful. There is no recipe for ...
15
According to the guidelines for scrum, the ScrumMaster is accountable for removing impediments to the ability of the group to deliver the sprint goal/deliverables.
The product owner has other responsibilities, such as conveying the vision, organizing and prioritizing the product backlog, interviewing stakeholders to determine what they need the product to ...
15
My question is, to what extent should the PO describe the requirements of a UI?
To the extent that the designers know what to design and the programmers know what to program. In your example, "as a user I want to see a list of dates so I can..." seems to be a good user story. Who else would know what the purpose of that user interface is and what data the ...
14
The roles can vary between organizations.
In general:
A team may be working on several projects, each with its own project manager and/or project lead within the team (if the project is spread out between various teams).
The team on the other hand has its own team manager or team lead (a matter of title in the organization).
In SCRUM each team works on ...
13
I tend to go by the definition made by James T Brown, within The Handbook of Program Management:
A program manager is first and foremost a leader. In fact, the program
manager's main leadership duty is to turn chaos into clarity for the
team. Any leader who allows chaos to exist or just passes chaos down
to the team without clarification is not ...
12
The Project Management role grew from needs to coordinate in the traditional environments. If the title sticks around, the role still has to change. I've seen PMs take on higher level coordination, become a PO, become a SM or design a new role altogether. This is all depending on your organization, quality of agile adoption and access to coaching. If not ...
11
Roles and Responsibilities for Team Composition
This is an interesting question, because it addresses some of the subtleties of self-organization with agile frameworks. In particular, it highlights the differences between authority and influence.
Scrum Team Members are responsible for identifying impediments (e.g. the team doesn't have sufficient expertise ...
11
TL; DR
For the immediate future, you need to spend more time working with the Product Owner and less time focusing on the development team. You and the Product Owner both need to spend a couple of sprints refining your roles and learning to work together, and you both need to gain a better understanding of your respective roles in the Scrum process.
Fix ...
11
Caveat at the start - these functional titles may be interpreted differently in different organations
Project Coordinator
responsible for the adminstration/bookkeeping of a project: preparing budget breakdowns, frequential reporting, supporting standard meetings and
Project Manager
responsible for planning, managing and steering the day-to-day activities ...
11
TL;DR
Slack is essential, but an excess of wasteful idleness is not. True leadership is being able to tell the difference.
Scrum Roles and Story Commitments
The Product Owner prioritizes the Product Backlog, but only the Development Team may estimate stories. The team uses these estimates, along with their estimated velocity, to determine how much work ...
10
This is a difficult and touchy subject. You may open up a Pandora's Box, so be absolutely certain that this is a big enough issue for you to push.
I would suggest:
Have a very clear listing of how you are adding value to the company. If you can't clearly say why you deserve more money you won't convince anyone. I've had an employee ("X") demand more salary ...
9
Here in our company, we have two paths to follow: Delivery (i.e. analysis / management) / engineering. There are some details that highlights each profile. I'll share some of them.
Communication: I believe the greatest watershed between these two careers. A Manager basically keeps the communication flowing. An engineer doesn't need as much communication ...
9
Having done research (genetics, protein chemistry, proteomics and bioinformatics) and having been a project manager with a research team (pre-clinical research) I can tell you that, based on my experience, having a project manager - or at least awareness and implementation of project management best practices - is very helpful because:
It helps keep the ...
9
Project management is a profession; it represents a career path and a body of knowledge while still allowing for specialization. This is no different than a doctor specializing in geriatrics or pediatrics.
A project manager is a functional role within a project team that should ideally be filled by a project management professional. Other roles within a ...
9
Testing is Everyone's Job
Agile teams should strive to be cross-functional. Even when some members of the team specialize, everyone should be involved in some aspect of test execution or test development. For example, on a software project limited to the roles you've defined:
Designers should be involved in Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD), ...
8
I have a different experience and perspective to what an engagement manager (EM) does and I expect the term means different things depending on context.
In my experience, on large projects where part of the work is outsourced to a third-party vendor, the EM is the person from the vendor organisation responsible for managing the relationship with the client ...
8
In the same way that a UX designer is responsible for creating an excellent user experience, a Scrum Master is responsible for creating an excellent project experience for those people who use the team to turn their ideas into reality.
By looking at the "team" from the external perspective, we can easily narrow down those bits of Scrum that are relevant ...
8
1) Accept the fact that the PO needs help and that the developers are the most qualified people to help.
The product owner and the developers together form a team. Nobody's time is more or less important than another. They work together to develop software. The team can't be expected to use their valuable time effectively if they don't have good stories, so ...
8
I am not deep into code testing but, from a QC perspective, having the same person check his/her own work is like having a prisoner keeping the key to his cell.
The QC objective is to find defects. The more defects found, the better the QC capability. That objective is inconsistent with the objective of the developer/builder, who is being measured by ...
8
I think the most useful advice can actually be found in the comment on your linked Question.
My manager was absolutely shocked to find out that we still had our stand up when he canceled it (a regular occurrence). My response to him was "The stand up isn't for you. It's for us. Whether you're here or not, we still need to sync up as a team.
The Daily ...
7
I see two approaches to the issue and from where I sit, I'm not sure which is the best approach:
Co-opt him: From the description, he has pride in his work and he puts out quality code but he does it his way. You have to make him believe that your way has become his way. Before you hand off the tasks, you have to spend time getting him "into" the current ...
7
Great question and definitely something that doesn't seem to be addressed very well in the standard material that is out there. I won't pretend to have all the answers as we are still struggling with this ourselves, but there is definitely still the need for an architect role in an agile environment. It is almost definitely different than the typical role ...
7
One of the best ways to avoid micro-managing is to first realize that by micro managing you are turning yourself into a human bottleneck. Nothing will happen without you, and your productive time will be sucked away doing things and solving problems for others which they should have learned to solve on their own a long while ago.
Once you realize this, the ...
7
tl;dr
Stop worrying that much about the amount of WIP and start worrying about getting the sprint done
At my job we've tried a lot of different things to keep the WIP at it's minimum. We're an extreme cross-functional team with members (8 in total) in six different areas (iOS, Android, .Net, Web, Testing and Design) and we're currently quite satisfied by ...
7
TL;DR
If you're still thinking in terms of strongly-defined roles rather than cross-functional teams, then you're not making a successful transition to an agile process. Agile teams may need all of the skills you've listed, but each of those roles is actually the responsibility of the whole team rather than of individuals, and it is up to the team to ...
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