As you read in my previous post “Approaching Scrum”, in the short description of this Agile technique, I talked about 3 main roles that composed the Scrum team.
The main 3 roles are:
- Product Owner
- Scrum Master
- Development Team
There are also other people that partecipate in a Scrum team and I’ll talk about them in a bit.
I’d like to share a brief introduction to each role before talk, in another post, about the Scrum process in details.
Where is the project manager ?
That’s a good question, as you can see above in the list of the main roles, the project manager role is not mentioned.
Basically what the project manager represents in the traditional software development where basically manage the communication between clients and the company, manage the team’s tasks and so on, in Scrum we are dividing those functions trough the members of the Scrum team (product owner, scrum master and development team) giving more responsibilities to them.
This thing will have a positive impact with the whole team that is more involved in each part of the project (planning, decision and development) and they can drive the risk using Scrum to achieve the best business value so the best result for their customers.
Another important aspect to take in consideration, when you are working with Scrum, is that we don’t have the concept of “project” anymore, but we’ll work on features and improvements with a continuos delivery instead of a “big bang delivery” at the end of the project.
This will ensure that we’ll focus more in the business value instead of waste time in something that is not important for that project and that couldn’t have the right value for our stakeholders.
For my perspective a natural evolution for a project manager could be the product owner, or if he has got a technical background could be Scrum Master; for sure the most important thing is that he has to change the way to approach any development and he has to think in a collaborative instead of a hierarchical way.
Product Owner
This role is very important inside a Scrum team, in fact the product owner is the “voice” of stakeholders and customers or users.
He is also the person that has the product vision, that is in charge to take the right business decisions during the development of a new or existing product and he has to help the team, if it’s possible everyday, answering on questions related to the product.
He is in charge to create and maintain the Product Backlog and to share the product vision with the whole Scrum team.
The most important thing is that the Product Owner is always available for the team because he is part of the team and his role is essential to accomplish all the business aims of a project.
In fact he is in charge to order the activities to do in the Product Backlog and to update them (this process is called grooming) following the customer’s perspective.
Usually the Product Owner is someone that have familiarity to talk with customers or internal management as well and he is quite technical to talk with the Development Team.
Scrum Master
The perfect definition of a Scrum Master is: “Mr. Wolf” !
The Scrum Master is the person that try to facilitate the use of Scrum inside the team, he has to remove impediments to the Scrum team, facilitate Scrum introduction in a new team, avoid any external distraction to the Development team and so on.
The key concept for any person that is approaching this role is that you are not a chief of someboy, you are coaching Scrum to people not imposing something to them!
In fact another good definition of Scrum Master is the servant leader.
Usually the Scrum Master is a Lead Developer or a QA person anyway it should be someone that has got enough technical knowledge to understand and solve the problem of the Team and to discuss with the Product Owner and guide him to create good artifacts for the Scrum team.
This activity required more or less the 50% of the time for a person so usually the Scrum Master is often member of the Development Team as well.
Development Team
When Scrum talks about Development Team it doesn’t mean only developers but a group of people that work actively to the product.
So inside the development team we can find: analysts, designers, testers, UX team, developers and so on.
In Scrum the team has cross-functional skills that allow them to deliver feature every Sprint.
Another important thing is that the team is self organised so nobody (nor the Scrum Master neither the Product Owner) can add activities to their daily job or impose the timeframe to finish a task.
At the beginning it could be so strange but in this case people in a team assume more responsibility and the project will be done in the best way ever.
In the old way to manage a team where the project manager imposed his role to have the feature that he wants when he wants, the team was only executive people without any relation with the project and often without any reward if the project will be well done.
In Scrum the team is in charge to estimate the project, to choose the task to accomplish during a Sprint deciding them with the Product Owner and, last but not least the team has to develop more features as possible with an high quality of code (tested, documented and so on).
We’ll talk more in deep about estimates and about the “definition of done” in next posts for now what you need to know is that the team is not passive anymore but they play an active and important role to achieve the goals of each product.
Other actors
In Scrum the main roles are what you have read above but there are many other people that partecipate to the good delivery of a product, in particular when you start to scalate Scrum to many teams.
In fact Scrum is a framework to manage 1 or 2 teams but not more, there are many other Agile frameworks that help you in this activity like SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework).
Other people that partecipate to the delivery of a project are for sure the stakeholders.
Stakeholders can be internal or external, when we refer to internal stakeholders we have to think to our management that share with the team their needs and how their point of view to improve or change the product developed by the team.
The external stakeholders are our customers or users, yes you read well, our customers or users are very important in the Scrum process because they are the ones that decide if the project is going in the right direction or is failing.
Personally I think is the biggest challenge involve our customers inside the Scrum process but for sure it will be very useful for the team and the product because they can constantly give us feedback on the right direction to take with the product.
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