I am taking a break from the many awesome benefits of SAFe to address an issue which has bothered me for a few years now. I am not surprised that the issue is happening, I sort of expected that the bubble would burst someday. This article might come across as a rant, but hopefully you get my point at the end.
There is a growing trend which I call the RIP Agile movement. The idea behind this is that Agile has so many limitations so we should discard it and come up with a new system of delivery; talk about throwing away the baby with the bath water. The Agile dilemma has many layers, and I will address two primary issues I have observed in the Agile space in this article.
Lack of leadership involvement
The Agile Manifesto is great, but it failed to require leadership involvement, which is a critical flaw of the Manifesto as no organization can successfully become Agile without the support of Leadership. Because leadership is responsible for setting up systems and structures that enable cultural shifts, resource allocation, decision making and empowerment, visibility and transparency, organizational alignment, amongst other benefits of leadership, excluding them or not having a system in place to ensure that leadership actually drives the transformation effort is a recipe for inevitable disaster. The team alone being Agile is not sufficient for Business Agility and such teams are usually faced with frustrations because they lack the support they need. Luckily, SAFe has fixed this by designing the SAFe implementation to start with onboarding leadership and putting them in the driver’s seat for the transformation.
Easy Come, Easy Go
This speaks to the ease with which people become “Agile Coaches” and “Scrum Masters,” this particular factor is a big contributor to this dilemma. I will be dwelling a lot on this second point as this is one area that I hope we can begin to address immediately. A lot of people have attacked the idea of certifications but certifications in and of themselves are not the problem. It is what the recipients do with their certificates that becomes problematic. Most people take the 2-day CSM class or get the PSM or any other Scrum certificates, and then it’s a wrap as far as learning and growth are concerned. Again, luckily, SAFe has fixed this by actually creating an IP (Innovation and Planning) Iteration during which employees have time for their personal growth and development. I will leave a link to SAFe’s IP Iteration article at the end.
There are a lot of memes, videos, jokes about the ineffectiveness of the Scrum Master and while I laughed and smiled at the first couple, I stopped seeing the humour in it once I realized that indeed, looking at what is actually happening in most organizations, it would seem that the Scrum Master is a redundant role, for lack of a better word.
In general, even the attendees of the 2-day certification courses are aware, and hopefully remember the role of the Scrum Master and that some of the responsibilities include: being a Servant Leader, Facilitator, Coach, Mentor, Teacher, Impediment Remover or Change Agent, Improving Flow, and the Team’s Performance amongst others. I’m not even sure that most Scrum Masters are aware that they are responsible for improving the team’s performance because of course, after the 2-day introduction to Scrum, they haven’t revisited the materials from their training or taken anytime to grow/learn/develop themselves. I have interacted with Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches who do not know that they should be having one-on-one meetings with team members and some actually push back because they do not consider themselves people-managers and believe only managers should hold one-on-ones. How would you effect the individual growth of team members if the only interaction they have with you is in a group setting? There are two opportunities for coaching/teaching/mentorship and that’s in group events and in opportunities designed to meet the needs of individual team members.
When I see jokes like “what does a Scrum Master do all day”? It makes me sad because a Scrum Master who is actually doing all they should be doing would actually be busy, most, if not all of the time. If a Scrum Master had to schedule weekly 30-minute meetings with individual team members outside of his other responsibilities, you would see how that would make him/her busy and productive. The very limited knowledge of many Scrum Masters, the failure to set an example for self-improvement is quite alarming, hence, so many organizations are eliminating the role. Nobody wants to pay big bucks for “nothing.”
I don’t even want to get started with Agile Coaches or with those who do not know the difference between an Agile Coach and a Scrum Master. To help with that, I will paste below an excerpt from an old article of mine:
1. Scrum is just a subset of Agile, although the most popular.
2. A Scrum Master is someone who is a Master of the Scrum framework and can lead and guide the team and organization to embrace Scrum, and understand the expectations of the framework and Agility, by extension.
3. While a Scrum Master is also a Scrum Coach, he or she’s knowledge of Agile (along with the requirements of the role of a Scrum Master) is very often limited to the Scrum framework.
4. Agile has so many other methodologies or frameworks besides Scrum. Some of these are: Extreme Programming; focuses on software development best practices, Lean Product Development; Agile was built on the principle of Lean; such principles as the seven forms of waste, pull systems, value stream mapping and Work In Progress. Lean also happens to be the source of the Kanban methodology, Kanban; has helped with task boards with Work in Progress limits and pull systems, Feature Driven Development; popularized Cumulative Flow Diagrams and Parking Lot Diagrams, these two are useful tracking and diagnostic tools, Dynamic Systems Development Method; impacted the development of Agile by making popular early architectural considerations, Agile suitability filters and Agile contracts, Crystal; family of methods tailored to match the specific requirements of a product delivery. All of these frameworks have contributed in no small measure to what has become the success of the Agile methodology today and they are the reason why Agile if embraced appropriately leads to increased business value for the customer.
5. An Agile Coach is someone who ideally, understands the different (or at least the most common) Agile methodologies comprehensively so he/she can advise/guide the team and organization on what framework/methodology or hybrid is most suitable for their product delivery.
6. Very frequently, a product delivery effort gets its best results by using/borrowing different practices from different methodologies. For instance, an Agile Coach might encourage a team using Scrum to try using Continuous Integration (borrowed from Extreme Programming) while building code to ensure that all code works together. This is a very important practice because it highlights problems with existing code before more is built on top of defective code thereby creating issues. A Scrum Master might not know much about this practice as his/her knowledge is limited to Scrum (which puts less emphasis than XP on software development best practices) but an Agile Coach would and should know, so essentially, an Agile Coach knows enough to borrow different best practices from different frameworks to achieve the best results.
The crux of my argument is that the roles of a Scrum Master and an Agile Coach are by no means interchangeable. An Agile Coach’s knowledge is T shaped; broad/comprehensive skills and knowledge and he/she coaches by bringing together different perspectives while covering all or most Agile methodologies while a Scrum Master is I shaped; narrow, his/her knowledge is limited to Scrum, one of the over 12 subsets of Agile.
Finally, I would recommend that an organization, on deciding to transition to Agile, if they do not require SAFe, bring on board an Agile Coach to introduce the team/organization to Agile. Even when an organization decides to use only Scrum, it would never know all the benefits it would lose by limiting itself to Scrum or to a Coach who has limited knowledge in an area where there are limitless possibilities that would invariably add more value to the organization’s business.
This article, hopefully, has helped highlight two crucial problems in the Agile space, next week I will write an article detailing how an effective Scrum Master can add measurable value to an enterprise.
Questions and comments are welcome.