Chapter 8
Management

Manager:

Ryan, glad you’re back from Scrum training. I have a few minutes, so tell me about this Scrum stuff that I just spent a lot of money on.

Ryan:

It’s a framework for delivery. There are three roles: Scrum master, product owner, and development team. Five events: sprint, sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review, and sprint retrospective. And three artifacts: product backlog, sprint backlog, and the increment.

Manager:

You’ve got the jargon down, but what does it mean for our teams?

Ryan:

It means that the development teams are now self-organizing and self-managing. We inspect and...

Manager:

Wait. Self-managing? If teams manage themselves, what do I do?

Ryan:

You support the teams. The point of Scrum is to get to “done,” and the teams decide how to do that.

Manager:

Let’s stop here. I’ve got to head to a meeting, but I have some serious concerns about Scrum that we need to talk about later.

In our fast-paced world, middle managers are getting sideswiped by the increasing rate of change. It seems that every day there’s a new blog post about how management is no longer needed on Scrum teams, or a new comic strip about a pointy-haired boss acting foolishly.

There are many good people in management who played by the rules, advanced to their current positions, and have now had the rug pulled out from under them by Scrum and the changing rules it ushers in.

What often goes unnoticed is how this shift in culture can trigger a feeling of loss in many managers. They’ve lost the confidence that they know exactly how things work in the organization. With loss can come grief, and here’s the problem: The first stage of grief is denial.

Managers who are in denial about their company adopting Scrum may try to thwart Scrum at every turn. Managers control budgets, have hiring and firing authority, and can leverage political connections in the organization to dig in and resist Scrum-related changes.

You may think that in this chapter we’re simply going to go down the well-trodden road of documenting everything that’s wrong with managers. But instead, we’re going to focus on you, the Scrum master, and your responsibility to coach and partner with management and the rest of the organization to ensure that Scrum is successfully adopted by all levels of your organization, from the Scrum team all the way up to C-level managers.

Remember, as a Scrum master, you provide many important services to your organization both during and after it adopts Scrum:

• You help management plan the company’s Scrum adoption.

• You lead and coach people (including managers) during the adoption process.

• You help everyone (yep, including managers) understand how empiricism and Scrum work.

• You serve as a change agent, provoking changes in the organization (with management support) that improve the way your Scrum team works.

It’s vital that you foster positive relationships with management and leadership so that you can perform your role well. But, as we all know, that’s often easier said than done. Managers are human, after all, and dealing with humans is tricky. If you’re currently struggling to work collaboratively with your company’s management, this chapter will give you some strategies that can help improve those relationships. We’ll describe some common management-related anti-patterns and suggest ways to better collaborate with management.