You probably know one of these situations yourself: You are looking for team members for your projects or perhaps you are also staffing projects with team members or are a team member in a project yourself. And then you ask yourself “What roles should there actually be in an agile project, do we need a product owner, project manager, scrum master or something completely different”?
When discussing role descriptions, it quickly becomes apparent that one and the same role is often interpreted differently. This means that role designations and required skills as well as the understanding of different stakeholders often diverge.
This article therefore aims to shed light on common misunderstandings and proposes measures for dealing with them.
“Agility” is an approach to software development, whereas “agile transformation” goes beyond this and refers to the transformation of the entire organization. To sharpen the mutual understanding, a brief definition is provided in the next section.
Software development organizational units are usually the agile drivers and pioneers for organizations. As a result, conflicts arise in companies due to different understandings of roles and expectations, particularly due to the new roles that are introduced with agile software development, such as the product owner (in agile software development according to Scrum).
Software development organizational units are usually the agile drivers and pioneers for organizations. As a result, conflicts arise in companies due to different understandings of roles and expectations, particularly due to the new roles that are introduced with agile software development, such as the product owner (in agile software development according to Scrum).
In detail, this opens up an area of conflict. In order to leverage the benefits of agile software development, development teams need a lot of room to manoeuvre and self-organization. These far-reaching rights are often not granted to them by organizations that are not fully agile.
Definitions
Agility:
Agile software development primarily refers to the continuous delivery of functioning software that is created in short iterations by self-organized teams.
Agility in organizations refers to acting in a flexible, proactive and anticipatory manner in order to react to changing conditions and introduce necessary changes.
The area of conflict usually begins with a different understanding of agility. While some companies carry out a complete agile transformation of all areas of the company, others only introduce agile methods such as Scrum in product development.
Scrum:
Scrum is an agile framework for team collaboration that is often used in software development, but is increasingly being used in other industries too.
Product Owner (Scrum):
In Scrum, the product owner is primarily “accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team” through “effective Product Backlog management” (product backlog: an ordered, dynamic list of requirements for the product).
“The Product Owner owns the product vision. They play a crucial role in guiding the rest of the Scrum Team toward a shared understanding of the product’s value, purpose, goals and direction. A professional Product Owner uses both agile product management and Scrum skills to fulfill their responsibilities:
- Product Owners use agile product management skills and techniques to manage the product lifecycle and its long-term business objectives. Examples include: market research and competitive analysis; product strategy; product roadmapping; acting as the voice of the customer; engaging with stakeholders; maximizing revenue and return on investment; product launch; and product retirement.
- Product Owners use Scrum and the elements of the Scrum framework to deliver on their vision of the product.
Scrum Master and Agile Coach:
Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches support employees, managers, teams and entire organizations in using agile methods.
The agile coach is a facilitator for continuous improvement in the context of agile organizational transformation. They often coach individual managers or entire organizations rather than teams (as is the case with Scrum Masters).
Scrum is facilitated by a scrum master, whose role is to educate and coach teams about scrum theory and practice. Scrum masters have differing roles and responsibilities from traditional team leads or project managers. Some scrum master responsibilities include coaching, objective setting, problem solving, oversight, planning, backlog management, and communication facilitation. Scrum teams do not involve project managers, so as to maximize self-organisation among developers.
Project Manager:
“A project manager is a professional in the field of project management. Project managers have the responsibility of the planning, procurement and execution of a project, in any undertaking that has a defined scope, defined start and a defined finish; regardless of industry.”
Challenges
When Scrum is introduced and the first product owners are hired, they are often only given responsibility for the product backlog, as well as some project management responsibilities such as budget control and progress reporting. However, product owners are not agile project managers but agile product managers. They and agile software development in general can only fully utilize their advantages if they are fully responsible for the entire product life cycle.
The emphasis here is on “responsible”, because just like backlog management, product management activities can also be delegated by the product owner to other people or team members. This is also strongly recommended for complex products and environments, e.g. when several teams are working on the same product. The product owner always remains responsible for the results.
The main feature of agility is retained: All information and decisions are the responsibility of the product team.
Attempt at a solution
Like project management methods, agile methods must also be adapted to the respective organization and existing structures. If the organization deals with these conditions transparently, this has advantages like:
- Necessary roles and skills are described in a goal-oriented manner
- Expectations between the business department and development are clearly defined
- This concerns, among other things, the expectation of obligations to cooperate on the part of the business department or the client
- Constructive cooperation is promoted and areas of tension are reduced
- Positions are filled effectively and sustainably
It is also helpful if the organization
- assesses and understands its own level of agile, digital and data maturity
- actively improves the maturity level if necessary
- involves its employees through change management and digital training concepts
Conclusion
Ultimately, it is not crucial for the success of products – and therefore also of companies – that certain role definitions are rigidly adhered to. The decisive factor is to provide agile, self-organized teams with sufficient resources and skills to achieve their goals.
Furthermore, organizations must actively address the topic of agile, digital and data maturity and deal transparently with the results.
If you follow these recommendations, you will also have the opportunity to successfully fill the team roles according to the required skills next time.