As a Scrum Master, you have certain rights and responsibilities.
In this video, I'm going to share three rights you need to be successful.
The first right of a scrum master is to have access to stakeholders and decision makers.
Lack of access isn't a common problem, but it occasionally comes up.
I worked in a call center systems project in which the developers and Scrum Master were not allowed to talk to the stakeholders.
The theory was that the call-center agents, who were all nurses, were far too busy to talked to developers, and the Scum Master.
That busyness was why they needed new software.
But without being able to learn their needs firsthand, we were making some bad decisions.
Everything had to funnel through our product owner.
That was not a scalable solution with over 100 developers on the project.
The developers basically resorted to stalking the nurses in the lunchroom because that was the only time that they could meet.
when a nurse was on his or her break.
That project was ultimately successful, but it probably could have gone faster if both the programmers and the Scrum Master had been given more access
to stakeholders and decision makers.
A second right of the scrum master is to be able to experiment with new ideas.
I love the fact that the majority of world now does two-week sprints.
But I think we've lost something as we moved away from four-week sprint.
Here's what we've lost.
The ability to experiment as frequently as we used to in the early days of Scrum with its longer sprints.
To see what I mean, consider a team in those early-days of scrum.
They would be doing a four-week sprint.
And imagine they have two options of how to achieve a goal.
One is the tried-and-true way.
Second is a possibly better way, but it's unproven.
The new way may not work, but if it does, it'll be better.
And with four-week sprints, teams very often would choose to try the riskier, breakthrough, innovative way, because if didn't work they would have just
spent three or four days on the experiment.
There would still be plenty of time to recover, to switch back to the safe approach.
Now we've moved towards shorter sprints and a lot of organizations have turned Scrum into a check the boxes process for determining if you finished all
the items you said you would.
If you did, you're successful.
But if haven't, failed.
And as that's happened, teams have moved away from feeling safe with experimentation.
Innovation recedes.
And so I'm mentioning this to you because I think it's important that we, as scrum masters, fight to establish experimentation as part of the company culture.
I am not talking about taking wild gambles or about experimentation during the final sprint of a major project.
But there are plenty of times during a project when it's worth trying an innovative breakthrough approach that may not work.
It's a worth a gamble sometimes instead of always using the tried and true approach.
Scrum Masters also need the right to address issues openly.
Part of your role as a Scum Master is to bring up problems and issues that need to be addressed.
If your company has a shoot the messenger culture, it'll be hard for you to continue bringing up issues when you're criticized and maybe even personally
attacked every time you do.
Do you have these rights in your organization?
Did you to argue to earn them?
Are there any additional rights you think you need as a Scrum Master?
Let me know in the comments.
I appreciate every comment.
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