MGMT 651 Week 5 DB Forum 5 Example

Discussion Board Forum 5: Thread and Two Replies

MGMT 651 Agile Project Management, Discussion Board Forum 5 (thread and two replies)

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt, the university's project and the classmates' posts are composites standing in for the course's own forum; Gido and colleagues' textbook, the Scrum Guide, the peer-reviewed studies and Scripture are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for MGMT 651.

Thread

Last year our university's financial aid office formed a six-person Scrum team to build a status tracker that shows students where their aid application stands: documents received, verification, award and disbursement. The team included three developers from the university's IT office, two financial aid counselors and a designer. Our former operations supervisor became the Scrum master, and leadership announced that the team would be self-organizing. For the first three sprints, almost nothing self-organized. At every daily scrum, team members reported what they had done and then waited for the supervisor to tell them what to do next. The counselors deferred to the developers on anything technical, and the developers deferred to the supervisor on everything else. Velocity in sprint three was half of the team's own forecast.

The Scrum Guide describes Scrum teams as self-managing, meaning that they decide internally who does what, when and how (Schwaber & Sutherland, 2020). Our team had the structure for self-management but not the behaviors. Hoda et al. (2013), studying 58 agile practitioners in 23 organizations through grounded theory, found that self-organizing teams depend on informal, often temporary roles that members take on: a mentor who guides the team in agile practice, a coordinator who manages customer collaboration, a translator who bridges business and technical language, a champion and a promoter who secure support from senior management and customers, and a terminator who removes members who harm the team. No one on our team had taken any of these roles, because everyone was waiting for the supervisor.

The Scrum master changed her approach in sprint four. She stopped answering the question "What should I do next?" and instead asked, "What does the sprint goal need from you?" She asked the senior counselor to act as translator in backlog refinement, explaining financial aid rules to the developers, and one developer to mentor the counselors in writing acceptance tests. In Gido et al. (2018), managing a project includes building and leading its team as well as tracking its tasks, and her shift fit that description. Lindsjørn et al. (2016), surveying 477 members of 71 agile teams, found that teamwork quality was positively related to team performance when team members and leaders rated performance, and strongly related to learning and work satisfaction. By sprint seven, our velocity had doubled and the counselors were proposing stories of their own.

Paul compared the church to a body whose parts do different jobs, each believer equipped by grace for a particular kind of service (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Romans 12:4-6). Self-organization is the discipline of letting each member's gift find its place in the work without waiting to be assigned.

Classmates: who on your team plays the translator role, even if no one has named it?

Reply to Tasha

Tasha, your thread described a daily scrum at your marketing agency where the creative director assigns each designer's tasks for the day, and you wondered why the team never seemed to take ownership, even though the agency had sent everyone to Scrum training.

According to the Scrum Guide, the daily scrum exists so that developers can check their own progress toward the sprint goal and replan the day, and the choice of how to build each increment is theirs (Schwaber & Sutherland, 2020). When the director assigns tasks, the meeting becomes a status report to a manager, and the team has no room to self-manage. Hoda et al. (2013) found that informal roles such as the mentor emerge when someone helps the team learn to organize itself rather than organizing it for them.

One change might be to ask the director to attend as an observer for two sprints while the designers pick their own tasks from the board. The director could then mentor in retrospectives, where experience helps most without taking decisions away from the team. The team's velocity and the designers' own sense of ownership, measured in a quick retrospective poll, would show whether the trial worked. Would the director agree to a two-sprint trial?

Reply to Luis

Luis, your account of the warehouse scanning app team at your distribution company was the opposite of most threads this week. Your developers self-organized so completely that they stopped consulting the product owner and built features that warehouse supervisors never asked for, including a dashboard no one opened.

Self-management in Scrum has a boundary. Under the Scrum Guide, the what belongs to the product owner, who answers for the backlog and its order, and the how belongs to the developers (Schwaber & Sutherland, 2020). Your team seems to have taken over the what as well as the how. Lindsjørn et al. (2016) found, interestingly, that teamwork quality predicted performance when team members rated it but had a negligible effect when product owners rated it, which suggests that teams can feel effective while drifting from what their customers value.

Bringing two warehouse supervisors to every sprint review might reconnect the team with the people who use the app. Gido et al. (2018) emphasize keeping the customer's needs at the center of project work. A simple rule, no story starts without the product owner's acceptance criteria, would also restore the boundary without slowing the team. Does your product owner attend the daily scrum or only the reviews?

References

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Gido, J., Clements, J., & Baker, R. (2018). Successful project management (7th ed.). Cengage Learning.

Hoda, R., Noble, J., & Marshall, S. (2013). Self-organizing roles on agile software development teams. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 39(3), 422-444. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2012.30

Lindsjørn, Y., Sjøberg, D. I. K., Dingsøyr, T., Bergersen, G. R., & Dybå, T. (2016). Teamwork quality and project success in software development: A survey of agile development teams. Journal of Systems and Software, 122, 274-286. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2016.09.028

Schwaber, K., & Sutherland, J. (2020). The Scrum guide: The definitive guide to Scrum: The rules of the game. https://scrumguides.org/