Scrum is a good thing and its free-for-all, but Scrum follows discipline too. I’ve seen too many new Scrum Masters who use Scrum and its practices as a weapon to control their team.
Imagine you assigned to a team that never completes stories in a single sprint or the team existed before you joined. You look back through and see that this is normal for this team. You should not try to fix this all at once in your next grooming and planning sessions for the upcoming sprint. While this example is the behaviour you should try to correct, you need to understand all the root causes before you can hope to stop it. You cannot simply start yelling at the development team, telling them that this isn’t how you do scrum and that they need to stop it.
The best Scrum Masters know how to engage a team to embrace the values of Scrum. I am describing the spirit of the Scrum Guide vs the letter of the Scrum Guide. Any good Scrum Master knows when to push the team towards the letter of the Scrum Guide. Remember we don’t need to try to figure out how to be as agile as possible with that brick wall in our way. A good Scrum Master was not beating his/her team up to follow the framework. They know when to hold to the framework and when to bend a little. So many new Scrum Masters beat their teams over the head with the Scrum Guide and believe it must be followed to the letter of the law for the sake of being good at Scrum. Remember, Scrum is means to an end. Being good at Scrum doesn’t matter if your team doesn’t deliver value and your customers are unhappy. Value focus is the key, and that’s where Scrum as a holistic framework drives you. It’s ok to tweak a little here and there, but if your practices are full of Scrum Buts, then there’s a good chance of having leakages in your value stream.
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