Ricardo Mestre’s Blog

If you are used to work in the command and control way that is implicitly imposed by futurology-based predictive processes, such as Waterfall, Scrum might look (at first site) like a “The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship(*)”-process. It’s the team members that attribute tasks to themselves? Whoa, what a chaos!

Not really. Remember that using Scrum means that the team is self-organized and (hopefully) autonomous. In order for a team to be self-organized, it takes a lot of discipline!

Let’s look at some examples - it takes discipline to:

• be at time everyday for the daily scrum meeting
• update, at the end of all working days, the estimated time remaining to complete the tasks you were working at
• concentrate on finishing the task you have in your hands, instead of starting 6 different tasks (and then finishing none, in the end)
• don’t interrupt co-workers when the are reporting their status during the scrum daily meeting

.. and that’s just for starters.

It takes a lot more discipline to work in a Scrum team, than to work in a command and control environment: on the later, you just do what you have been told to.

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(*)winking at Mr. Bukowski

Boris Gloger this (on his blog) about the role of a Scrum Master.

“That [struggling] is the measurement if you do it right. If it is easy you are failing in doing the job right. Changing the work behavior of a team, an organization or even a whole enterprise is not a piece of cake. It is terrible hard work.”

Exactly! And I must add: if you think that filling the role of Scrum Master will win you a popularity contest… think again.
So, only bad news in this post? Not really: if you’re doing right, nothing beats the feeling of “fighting the good fight”.
Have a nice weekend, everybody!