Chapter 2: New Management Responsibilities

Overview

As you saw in Chapter 1, in Scrum, the world is divided into pigs and chickens. Pigs are those who are committed to a project, those who have ‚“skin in the game. ‚½ Chickens are the spectators. This analogy can help us to understand the three management roles in Scrum; all three roles are ‚“pig ‚½ roles. These roles ‚ Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and Team ‚ are clear and easy to understand. Although it might seem counterintuitive that Teams are managers, one of the central tenets of Scrum is that Teams handle their own management. All other managers in an organization are chickens, who might be interested in the project and who might have a strong vested interest in its success, but who have to work through the pigs. Chickens have no direct authority over the project ‚ s execution or progress.

The good news is that Scrum greatly simplifies issues of accountability and authority for Scrum ‚ s management. The bad news is that the Scrum management roles are difficult to play. Managing complex work is never easy, and Scrum never gives its managers a break. Scrum practices regularly make visible a project ‚ s progress, problems, and sociology. Scrum management is responsible for inspecting the aspects of the project that Scrum makes visible and adapting accordingly .

In this chapter, I ‚ ll present these three Scrum management roles and show how they work. In later chapters, I ‚ ll talk about people who filled these roles ‚ with varying degrees of success.