SCRUM - Product Owner and ScrumMaster

I was working in the Scrum framework  for the last 4 years. My role is a Product Owner. It has been a journey with many challenges, opportunities and lessons learned. Despite the fact that there is a clear trend that more and more companies adopt agile development, it doesn't make it easier to bring up to speed any new project participant. It is hard for newcomers to understand right away the SCUM's benefits. It is not easy to make them think and act withing the framework and have relevant expectations. I would say that it doesn't matter if a  a new participant is in the development team or on the business side, it is equally demanding to make them grasp the SCRUM process. Having geographically dispersed teams makes managing adoption, changes to the new processes for newcomers even more complicated. In a series of posts I will share my "lessons learned" and knowledge from my  previous researches and training. Since I am a project manager by trade, it is part of my professional obligations to educate about project management and in this case about Scrum.

In a very simplified description  there are four  main roles in Scrum:

1. Stakeholders
2. Product Owner
3. Team
4. ScrumMaster.

Here is a good diagram that I have borrowed from the site describing pretty well these roles




However, in practice it is more complicated than fitting all participants into these well defined roles and expect the desirable behavior from them. A big part of the success in the SCRUM adoption process are Product Owner and Scrum Master. In the real life and especially in the geographically dispersed teams their responsibilities sometimes are not well understood withing a company which cause them sometimes to fulfill partially each other roles.

Here is an excerpt from the  Andrew Pham and Phuong-Van Pham book "Scrum in Action: Agile Software Project Management and Development " about qualities for people in these two roles.

The seven qualities of a great Product Owner are:

1. Know how to successfully manage the stakeholders’ expectations and sometimes conflicting priorities.
2. Have a clear vision and knowledge of the product.
3. Know how to gather requirements to turn the product vision into a good product backlog.
4. Be fully available to actively engage with the team, not only during the sprint, but also during the release and sprint planning.
5. Be a good organizer who can juggle multiple activities, while keeping things in perspective and maintaining her composure.
6. Know how to communicate the product vision; not only to the team, but also with the business, so their trust in the team remains intact throughout the life of the project.
7. Be a good leader, able to guide, coach, and support the team as needed while making sure that the business gets the value they expect out of IT.

The seven qualities a ScrumMaster should have are:

1. In depth theoretical and practical knowledge of Scrum
2. Great servant-leadership ability
3. Strong organizational skills
4. Great communication skills
5. Excellent presentation skills
6. Conflict resolution skills
7. Excellent human development skills.

Big part of the Product Owner and Scrum Master responsibilities is to protect a team from the external environment.  

Source: Scrum in Action: Agile Software Project Management and Development by Andrew Pham and Phuong-Van Pham.  

By my humble opinion, a big part of the SCRUM success in  IT projects is having a baseline for project inputs, outputs, tools, roles, expected behaviors as in any framework build on practicality. 

So, educating new project participants is a very important part of any company that wants to harvest from the Agile frameworks used in IT development.