Lately I have become disheartened by the what I see as bastardisation of Scrum in implementations I am engaged to coach and others that I hear about.
One such bastardisation is the increasing practice of formalising the scrum roles as job titles.
Agile is simple and, I contend, CAN be simply done in any organisation and any sized organisation. It takes passion, it takes vision and it takes belief in people. But when I hear that HR departments are creating job titles as ‘Product Owner’, ‘Scrum Master’ and worse still, ‘Advanced Scrum Master’ – one who master’s multiple teams; it boils my blood.
‘Hey Mike, why is it so bad to have these roles as job titles?’ - well the biggest challenge I face as coach is weaning teams and individuals off the addiction of siloed specialisations (‘I’m an architect, I don’t do code!’). Simply put, the roles in a Scrum team as within a development team should be fluid and flexible in an effective agile implementation, by formalising the roles as job titles reduces the fluidity to a type of smelly sludge. (peew!)
Self organisation is fundamental to agile , infact it is instinctive for most fairly intelligent beings and rigid job titles (bucked up with secret and inequitable pay scales) violate this instinct.
When an organisation goes down this path, it is an indication (to me anyway!) that they are only paying lip service to being agile and their implementation is controlled by people who do not really have a clue.
There are many excellent agile teams out there – I’ve seen them and they get tremendous value from just getting on with the roles without prancing around with ‘Product Owner’ as an official job title.