Who’s responsible for a scrum team’s performance?
There was a big change in the 2020 scrum guide. The scrum master is now on the hook for the effectiveness of the scrum team. So the buck stops with the scrum master. And the reason that this was introduced, I believe, was to stop situations where scrum masters were asking lots of Socratic questions and doing lots of observation, which is a really good thing to do. But they were just watching this and bad behavior was happening on their watch. Unhealthy conflict was happening on their watch. The team’s performance was going down on their watch. And so it was felt that it was a good move to have somebody on the hook for the effectiveness of the team.
Now it gets a bit tricky because the developers need to be self-managing. The scrum team is self-managing. And really the interventions from a scrum master should be in the case where it feels like the team is descending into chaos, bad things are happening and the scrum master needs to step in to make sure that bad things don’t happen.
We’re all ultimately responsible for our own performance. The developers, are responsible for delivering a high-quality increment, the product owner for maximizing the value that goes through the scrum team, the scrum master needs to be coaching, mentoring, teaching, advising, observing, helping people in all sorts of different stances, helping the product owner, helping the developers, but also helping the organization so that the scrum team can be effective.
And that means sometimes that the scrum master needs to go beyond the team, work with other teams that we depend on. Maybe work with other functions, maybe help to declutter, some processes workflows and so on. Even de-clutter the product, cause sometimes there’s too many features in the product, keeping the product order, some hints that maybe the product, the service needs to be simplified so that we get more engagement from our customers and end-users.
Ultimately short answer is the scrum master. Thank you.
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