Why Can’t I Tell My Scrum Team What They Will Commit To?
product owner Scrum ScrumMaster
I’m a Product Owner of a newly formed Agile Scrum team. I’ve never been a Product Owner before (I’ve only ever worked in Marketing, but now find myself sitting in IT with the software development team). I’d say we’re struggling with our Agile/Scrum implementation we’ve never done it before and are finding our way through the Agile forest by reading books. We don’t have any ScrumMasters or anyone I can ask for help. There’s one person in my software Scrum team who know a bit about Agile and he keeps telling me that I can’t tell the team what to commit to. He’s quite senior and I’m pretty junior and although I’ve questioned this once or twice I don’t feel I know enough about Agile or Scrum to have anything other than a completely one sided conversation!
I feel pretty rubbish as he takes over the planning session, picks what we do from the backlog and too be honest I don’t really know what I’m doing in the meeting. Help me please, is this how it should work? What’s the point of me being in the meeting?
OK, first ya’ll need training. Next, get an Agile Coach who knows what they are talking about (been in the trenches) and will help you on the path.
Next, you own the Product/Project/Release Backlog. The team estimates (not one person, no matter how senior) it in Story Points and you prioritize it. The team needs to work with you each Sprint to work on the next X number of stories to commit to in the Sprint. They need to work on your next most important Stories but you need to work together because sometimes it just makes sense to work stories in a certain order and the IT knows that best. But they need to understand you are responsible for ROI of the product.
If you don’t have a Scrum Master you are likely not doing Scrum. Get a Scrum Master and again, one that that’s been around for a while and knows what they are doing.
This question is from a while ago so you are likely beyond this problem but this might be good information for others.
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LikeDislikeYou cannot tell the team what to commit to because you will not be the person doing the work. It is the team that are the experts in software development, not you. They will decide what they can complete within the sprint (although they should decide this collaboratively and not be dictated to by a senior member of the team).
Remember you won’t get buy-in from a team if you tell them what to commit to, the team will not treat this as a commitment. Think about it – would you pull out the stops to make a deadline that you have been set or one that you committed to?
I agree with David when he says you need an Agile Coach, or a ScrumMaster that has experience with rolling out Scrum to new teams. Sprint Planning meetings (or any meeting for that matter) should not be taken over by any one person. A good ScrumMaster will facilitate the meeting so that everyone is involved but the voices of the quieter ones are not drowned out by the more dominant characters in the team.
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