My scrum blind spots — part 3
All articles of this series can be read on their own.
Two years ago my company was in trouble. We weren’t effectively delivering value to our stakeholders and we didn’t stand out compared to our competitors. The company literally stopped growing, which is no small feat in our fast-growing industry.
Many in the company knew that changes were needed, so the company moved away from silos. Most teams adopted Scrum as their way to manage the product, helping to remove these silos. The journey started with our existing people. Everyone had to adapt to the new way of working, because the old way of working didn’t exist anymore.
Many saw the changes as improvements. The employee satisfaction score were higher than ever since we changed our way of working. But not everyone adapted.
![Green pawn separated from group of red pawns Green pawn separated from group of red pawns](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F82685fa6-281c-492b-9391-c3a349176a04_800x475.jpeg)
Some struggled with the changes
A minority of the people struggled. Some hated to be part of a team. They preferred to work on their own, sinking their teeth into a complicated piece of software. Others simply couldn’t do it. They didn’t have the capacity to work with others.
I believed — wrongly — that this was just a matter of explaining to these people how Scrum works, training them in Scrum and having the right balance of people in a team. I used to think that everyone is suited to be part of the Scrum team. Now I know that this was a blind spot of mine.
Some people found another team where they were happy. For others it didn’t work this way. They tried working with several teams, but every time they struggled.
Several factors played a role:
Issues with the culture of the teams. One person didn’t feel comfortable with the culture that emerged from having self-organising autonomous cross-functional teams. He primarily had issues with the directness of conversations. He always felt like he was on the back-burner of decision-making.
Issues with the uncertain nature of an empirical environment. Another person didn’t like how directions shifted when new insights required the team to do so. And changes happened often. She wanted to go back to the times where she was allowed to work on one thing for multiple weeks.
Issues with not being able to make your own decisions. With teamwork comes that a Development Team needs to find ways to make decisions together. This was an issue for a person that liked to be in control of his own personal backlog, the choices of how to approach the backlog and what solution to apply.
There may be more factors, but these were the ones that were impacting the people that struggled within our company.
Prerequisites to work with Scrum teams
We found that you can’t simply swap from one way of organising your software development department to another way. To move from traditional project management to Scrum, you need to invest in the people involved. This can be done in multiple ways:
Make the working environment a place that welcomes diversity, including diversity of characters. This includes allowing engagement of the whole Scrum Team.
When you recruit new people, keep in mind what working environment you have and how this impacts your needs. Willingness to work in a team could trump expert knowledge where people keep knowledge to yourself.
Check if you also have a space for the people that wish to work on their own — outside a team, but inform them that they have to interact with teams!
Scrum teams need to collaborate
The Scrum environment can be very demanding for people as it requires a different type of interaction and collaboration than in a traditional project environment. Some people may struggle with this and you will not find a sufficient solution for everyone. If you can’t find a satisfactory alternative for someone struggling with working in Scrum teams, then it might be in the best interest of the person to part ways. It’s better to acknowledge this than to continue making someone unhappy, impacting the rest of the team too.
For me personally I again got a confirmation that I should embrace the fact that I don’t know everything.
The more you know the more you realise you don’t know — Aristotle