Part 2: When and Why to Fire a Scrum Master? - Decision Making

As I mentioned in previous post main question is changing a bit - “What and Why to Fire a Football Coach?”

Would you fire a Football coach when he makes all the decisions for the team on the field? Why? The answer seems very obvious. If this happens - team loses opportunity to get better as they don’t learn by making own failures. All decisions are made by players during the game: tackle, shot on goal and etc… Of course principles and tactics are agreed before the game, but when the game starts a lot of things can change and a lot of things depend on players. What coach can do is to assist the team and make maximum 3 substitutions if things get out of control.

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Main reason why it happens this way in football is the “system” itself. Rules don’t allow coach to run on the field and instruct everybody how things should be done. Unfortunately nothing prevents us from doing that in our daily routine. That’s why it’s so easy for “new” scrum master to fall into micro-management and “break” the sprint. And if such behaviour continues, probably even the team spirit can suffer in the long run.

What could be alternative of such “system”  in software development that prevents micro-management? I have such thoughts:

  • focus on providing as much information as possible, so team could make proper decisions
  • walk away 🙂

Could you help to come up with more ideas?

Next post on this topic: Part 3: When and Why to Fire a Scrum Master? – Planning and Analysis

p.s. presentation is available here. I will go through it in further posts.