The dysfunctions of a scrum team

Editor's Notes

• #5: So let me tell you a story but before that, here’s my disclaimer. All the characters, the events and the organization that I am referring to are all fictional, any resemblance to person, event or organization is purely a co-incidence. Syfions Limited was a big organization that decided to embark on their agility journey. They decided to pilot the program with few teams. They were aware of something called as Scrum and hence decided to send their 3 Senior Project Managers, Mark, Raul and Ashwin to a two day training program to become Scrum Masters who would take them on this transformation journey. After returning from the training program, the SPMs told the management that they want people from business to become Product Owners and without them Scrum cannot work. However, since business folks were too busy they got BAs (Rakesh, Venice and Charlie) to go to another training program. These folks after finishing their training were designated as the Proxy Product Owners. And like many other organizations in their vicinity they setup a offshore development model with distributed teams. The SPMs also set up their JIRA boards to be agile. They started creating User Stories for all the work on the JIRA board. They concurred that since most software teams follow a two week sprint, hence they would also use the same. Rakesh maintained the Backlogs for team whitewalkers and phantoms; Mark was the Scrum Master for them. Raul was the Scrum Master for teams GrayHats and Catmagic; Venice was the POP for these teams. Ashwin was Scrum Master for the team Challengers and Charlie was their POP and maintained their backlogs. The Sprints started with Sprint Planning; where the POPs told the work items to be finished and the Scrum Masters used to assign the work to the team members. The work was already defined and estimated by the team lead along with the POPs, Scrum Master and Architects. Once the Sprint planning is done, the team members used to execute it. Every day the team used to have a Daily Standup meeting where the Scrum Master would take the status update on each work item and made changes to the Jira board. During the Sprint Demo the POPs used to accept the work items or put them on hold for further clarifications from the business. They also used to a retrospective once every two sprints; since team had a lot of work to do and not much to improve on. The work area for these teams was also renovated, with each member getting dual screens, every team having a personal Big Screen and polycom setup. They also got a TT and Foosball for these teams. This work area was now the “state of the art” work area and other teams were envious of the agile teams. Three months down the line the CTO Dean, had a chat with Raul and Ashwin. He mentioned he is not seeing much of agility from their teams. Mark’s teams are delivering 80 Story points every sprint, but their teams were struggling at 30 and 40 Story points each. They should improve their game. A week later all the POPs and SMs get a memo from the CTO that they need to go live and their teams should be ready with the integrated product in three weeks. Now was the time of real chaos; as the teams started integrating their work the product began to fall like a house of cards; there were too many defects and nothing was working together. The teams spent sleepless nights and worked over weekends but no miracle happened. They missed the go live date and took another 5 months to stabilize the product. After that the C-level had a conference and figured out that the new way was not providing the ROI that they thought it would; so it should be stopped. Scrum does not work for them. And they returned back to their old ways of working. Although, I gave a disclaimer at the start that this is fictional work; but did it ring any bell? If it did then folks welcome to my reality. All that I described is very much true in the world that I operate in. Let me share with you a few common dysfunctions that I have come across.