Scrum Team interactions under pressure
By: Paddy Corry
Tags: Scrum, Livingthescrumvalues, Scrum Master, Product Owner, Serious Scrum

The Product Owner’s Perspective

Shane is growing more frustrated that Ann spends less time with the team these days. It seems her reputation for delivering Scrum training has appealed to other areas of the business, and as a result she is now involved with other teams quite often. Unfortunately though, her own team needs her help too, and quite often she isn’t there!

Just last week for example, Shane had talked to the helpdesk about how their ticketing processes were interrupting the team unnecessarily. They would assign low priority issues straight to development team members, and the guys on the Scrum team – in all good faith – were jumping on the issues because they assumed prioritisation had happened in the background.

He had dealt with it himself, and all was OK now, but… shouldn’t that be the Scrum Master’s role?

Then, this morning, it happened again.

He had just finished preparing for an important stakeholder update. The meeting was going to be high-stakes with some challenging expectations to manage, but he had gathered the data, and he was ready.

As he made his way out of the team area, he walked past two members of the Scrum Team discussing an unfamiliar sounding issue. It certainly didn’t sound like the Provider Migration Project work from the Sprint Backlog…

Alarm bells started ringing in his mind. The team was under real pressure from senior business stakeholders to get this one done, or a key client relationship would be at risk. The guys knew the value of that sprint goal! There was only one person who would get it in the neck if that delivery was late…

Shane stopped and asked the guys what they were discussing. It wasn’t a sprint backlog item, it was a helpdesk ticket. Sigh.

The two guys looked at each other. Tom, a senior developer, said that he was assigned an issue in the Production Support ticketing system, and needed some help from Nikita, the team’s Business Analyst, to diagnose it so he could update the ticket.

Shane peered at Tom’s screen and saw what he dreaded: this was a medium priority issue, created six months ago! Why was it suddenly assigned to Tom? This was nonsense, exactly the kind of interruption the team didn’t need right now.

Frustrated, he looked to Ann’s desk and she was not there. Again.

“Where’s Ann this morning?” he asked, and worried for a moment that he sounded more aggravated than he wanted to in front of the team. It was difficult to self-manage right now though, because this was happening more often all the time!

“She’s doing that Agile workshop with the Finance team until lunchtime… uh, I think,” Tom replied, a little nervously.

Shane looked at his watch, sighed and pulled out his phone. He started typing an instant message to Joanna, one of the Provider Migration Project’s key stakeholders, to say he needed to miss the stakeholder update, but he would catch her later.

All the while he typed, he was thinking: “what is the point of a Scrum Master…?”

Once the message was sent, he turned to Tom. “OK, let’s talk about this for a moment before I go over to the helpdesk and brain them.” At the same time, he was thinking exactly the same thing about the Scrum Master.

Left unchecked, pressure can build, and it affects people in different ways…

The Scrum Master’s Perspective

This was definitely the last Scrum workshop Ann would deliver for now. The CFO had really been pushing his luck by asking for two more, but after all, he had done this the right way. He had received approval from the Head Of Product before asking Ann. He might have been stretching things to ask for two more than the original request, but it would be career-limiting for Ann to refuse the CFO, right?

She was duty-bound, it seemed, but she also resolved to meet with the head of Product afterwards, because these workshops were becoming a real impediment to her ability to work with the Scrum Team.

Still though, she knew how important it was for the finance department to embrace agility and she loved being a part of that! Agile values and principles shared across the organisation: how cool was that!?

The thing was, the entire Scrum Master squad was really overstretched right now, and this was just one symptom of it: while she worked on this training (for which there was no other Scrum Master even remotely available) her team had to cope without Scrum Master cover. She needed to make a case for hiring more Scrum Masters… but there would be more time needed for that too! Sigh.

While delivering the training, Ann kept one eye on the Instant messaging window on her laptop to see if any new requests for support were coming in. All quiet so far. Phew! If the team didn’t get their key deliverable in good condition by the end of this sprint, there would be tough conversations ahead.

Ann felt a little distracted as she fielded questions from the room. She certainly wasn’t as well prepared for the workshop as she wanted to be this morning. There had been an infrastructure issue earlier with pipelines that required a lot of conversations to progress, and as a result, she was ten minutes late to the workshop. Stress! At least the tests were running in the pipelines again. (Last she heard anyway!)

On a normal day, Ann enjoyed delivering Scrum training, but she was finding it increasingly difficult to balance these workshops with the needs of the team. It felt like the team was under more pressure to deliver all the time, and needed more of her help all the time, even though she wanted the opposite to be true.

While she felt bad spending time away from the team, she also felt a little conflicted on the subject too though. Wasn’t it also part of her job to provide service to the organisation like these workshops for Finance? If in the process, the Scrum Team learned a little independence in her temporary absence, was that such a bad thing?

Above all else though, she was getting concerned about how Shane was acting towards her in the last few weeks. Their relationship had always been a little tense, but it was definitely positive before events of the last few weeks. Lately, he was becoming quite noticeably tetchy with her. She knew it was related to this training for Finance: after all, today’s two hour workshop wasn’t even the first one this sprint!

She needed to chat to him about it, but it was so hard for them both to find the time. Things were just so busy right now, for both of them. And, if she was honest with herself, she dreaded the conversation, and was putting it off.

The only time they had really discussed it was in a recent sprint review. He made an apparently off-the-cuff comment about how she was moonlighting for Finance for a better chance of an annual bonus, but clearly he wasn’t happy.

If she was honest, she felt a little disappointed that he would raise the issue in a public forum like that, and she was still smarting a little from the barb.

Time to talk?

Is there a simple solution?

In this complex context, Ann and Shane have many issues to deal with, but the critical issue I want to discuss is how they interact with each other.

Individuals and interactions are at the core of agile teams, and crucially important in complex environments. Respect, courage and openness are three of the Scrum values. Ann and Shane need to start living all three of these values if they are going to improve this situation.

One other key point: this failure to interact well is starting to impact the development team. They are unsure why Ann is absent, and why Shane is managing interruptions, and the last sprint review was really tense. Both Ann and Shane seem really on edge lately.

Empiricism is also the foundation of Scrum. Unfortunately, Ann and Shane’s interactions have become fraught, but the reasons why are not transparent to both of them them. If they discussed the reasons, they would understand that they are both acting in good faith, but perhaps Ann needs to talk to the Head of Product about prioritising the Scrum Team more right now.

They have not yet had a good conversation to explain their stories to each other. As a result, they cannot yet work together to understand the situation better (inspect) and make changes together to help resolve it (adapt).

The longer Shane and Ann delay their crucial conversations, the more their behaviors will become part of the team’s way of working. Culture is made with behaviors and they can either inflate or deflate the Scrum Values.

By living the Scrum values, and by embracing an empirical approach to how they interact, Ann and Shane could create a more positive, safer culture in their team.

What do you think? Can you relate to this story? How would you react in this Scrum Team? Do you have a similar story like this?