If you are a Scrum project manager, Scrum has bad news for you: you no longer have a say! Liberty, equality, fraternity – your role in a Scrum project calls you to humility. According to the Scrum Guide:
- You may not assign tasks to the team
- You may not decide what gets implemented
- You may not tell the team how to work
- You may not demand status reports
You are, however, allowed to do a few things. You may:
- Ensure good working conditions, e.g., provide good Scrum software ;)
- Represent and shield the team from the rest of the organization
- Take care of providing resources
In Scrum, the tasks and responsibilities of a traditional project manager are distributed across three roles: the Product Owner, the Scrum Master, and the Team. The Product Owner represents customer interests and decides what is to be delivered and in what order. They also determine whether the deliverables meet the requirements.
The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring adherence to the rules the team has established for conducting the project. They make sure everything runs according to Scrum. They are responsible for removing anything that might prevent the team from performing at its best. The Scrum Master is not overall responsible for achieving the project goals.
So who bears the overall responsibility? The answer is: everyone, and therefore no one! It is similar to a soccer team, where each individual contributes to the overall result, but when there are too many defeats, it is not the team but the coach who gets fired. In practice, this is also the only way it can work with Scrum.
The Scrum Master role lends itself to taking on the traditional tasks and responsibilities of a manager. If you have already cultivated a cooperative leadership style, it won’t be difficult for you to give your team as many degrees of freedom as possible and to communicate with your team members on an equal footing. You would have already been leveraging the expertise of team members and taking their opinions, assessments, and suggestions seriously.
You have probably already heard that there are certified Scrum Masters. In such a certification course, you might learn one thing or another. Otherwise, such a certification is perhaps comparable to the coronation of medieval kings by the Pope. They were no wiser after the ceremony, only poorer and better legitimized. If you can do without such an anointment based on your technical and interpersonal competence, your common sense and some engagement with the basic ideas of Scrum will guide you on the right path even without a certificate.
Further Information
If you’re interested in reading more about Scrum, you can do so here. In this article, you can see an overview of Agile Project Management principles.
Gabriella Martin
Editor and Writer
Gabriella Martin is a Yale University graduate and holds a Master's degree in German Literature from the University of Tübingen. She loves explaining complex things in simple terms.
