1. Scrum Roles

Surely you are familiar with the agile methodology called scrum. Scrum is a process whereby a whole team works in cycles instead of implementing a predefined plan. This is often a big change for an IT team, nevertheless many IT departments have made this transition and now work according to scrum.

Tobias Müller is the Managing Director of progile.ch and also a scrum expert. Coopers asked him what the reasons are for scrum implementations failing. In this blogpost Tobias Müller explains how important it is to have the right people in place for the right scrum roles.

The Product Owner is responsible for defining a product. He is the first point of contact for questions regarding the requirements, interacts with all stakeholders and owns the backlog. Tobias Müller has often seen that a Project Manager takes on the role as Product Owner. However, it would make more sense making a Product Manager a Scrum Product Owner because the Product Manager is in direct contact with the clients.

The scrum master ensures that everyone sticks to the process and removes any impediments to the team can work efficiently. According to Tobias Müller often a developer is nominated as scrum master. He may see this as a mini promotion, however that is not the case. A good scrum master is a problem solver, not a leader. His main task is to make sure that everything runs smoothly. At the beginning his role will be a 100% role, but as soon as the team has settled in, it should not need him anymore.

In principle scrum only works if all scrum guidelines are followed. Inventing new roles such as for example „Head of Scrum" is just as wrong as adding additional columns to the scrum board such as „Waiting" or „Analysing" or changing the defined scrum board titles in any way.

In one of the next Coopers blog posts Tobias Müller gives Managers tips on how to implement scrum and tells us what he thinks the best scrum trainings are. Keep your eyes open for those scrum blog posts!