Dear Scrum Helpline,
I’m currently working as a Business Analyst in a software development team within a local authority. We aspire to be a cross-functional team, but the reality is the UI design team rules the roost.
So pretty, high-fidelity designs get presented to the client with almost no consideration of whether they add sufficient value or are even possible to implement.
The mess then gets dumped on the BA and architect to fill in the specification gaps and reset expectations.
I feel too far down the foodchain to make much of a difference.
Response by Guy Maslen, Scrum Master:
Dear Friend,
“Tell me you are using a homebrew version of Scrum without telling me you are using a homebrew version of Scrum”.
Have you heard this saying before?
By that I mean my go-to tends to be “and when you raised this in your retrospectives what happened?”
Which then unpacks whether you’ve been having retrospectives, and whether it’s okay to raise difficult topics without relationships being damaged.
More or less that’s Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety and learning in teams, which Google went on to adopt as one of their improvement projects.
- No psychological safety? No learning.
- No learning? No improvement.
The DevOps movement drew on Ron Westrum’s “typology of organisational cultures,” which basically says the same thing in a different way.
Deming talked about the impact that “fear” has in the workplace as one of his core points in “Out of the Crisis!”.
Scrum suggests we need to be “courageous”, but this is pretty unhelpful without the right support.
Either way, I’d guess that the Scrum Master is MIA or lacks the skills to influence the organisation.
Here’s a resource that might help: Team dynamics: The five keys to building effective teams – Think with Google.