Free Essay: Agile Team Roles

Agile team building entails the establishment of holistic teams that exhibit cross-functional capabilities. Specialists drawn from different domains contribute to the team’s knowledge pool and help to construct stable iterative structures. The traditional project manager roles are distributed under the Scrum framework so that the resulting team is more creative, flexible, and productive (Sullivan (2017). Also, agile teams are self-organized and exhibit a high level of accountability since there is minimal external influence on the decisions made and the actions taken. The Scrum framework for agile implementation specifies the development team, the Scrum master, and the development team, which have distinct balanced roles.

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Roles of Agile Project Team

The product owner in the scrum framework performs most of the roles played by the project manager. The most prominent roles performed by the product owner include stakeholder, integration, and schedule management. The product owner also handles cost, risk, and communication management (Sullivan, 2017). The product owner provides the stakeholders’ perspective to the project and exhibits soft skills that help to communicate the project requirements to the development team. The product owner also ensures the long-term expectations of all stakeholders.

The development team handles sprint-level project management activities. The principal role of the development team is product development (Sullivan, 2017). Hence, some of the skills needed in the development team include product design, code writing, programming, testing, and user experience design. Besides these technical skills, development team members must also have soft skills, which enable them to handle conflict and mitigate risks. Overall, the development team remains undertaking work sprints as established by the product owner.

The scrum master acts as the team leader. The scrum master manages the scrum process, supports, and promotes scrum by disseminating information that helps every team member to understand the rules, practices, values, and theory of scrum (Przybilla et al., 2019). The scrum master supports the product owner by ensuring that every member of the scrum team understands the project goals, domain, and scope as spelled by the product owner. The scrum master also devises techniques that enable the adequate understanding of product planning and helps the product owner to understand what backlog exists and how to realize maximum value.

Importance of Soft Skills to Scrum Masters

Scrum masters require soft skills to execute their responsibilities. Foremost, the scrum master must be a facilitator. As a link between the product owner and the development team, the scrum master must be prepared to bring together team members, departments, and other stakeholders. Scrum masters must be problem solvers so that they can manage conflicts and ensure that the product owner’s objectives are met within the desired time frame. Unlike the traditional project manager role, which requires a strong and more directive approach, the scrum master must be a team player and coach (CollabNet, 2013). Team building becomes an essential trait for someone who is transitioning from a project manager role to a scrum master role. The scrum master requires change management skills to ensure that the team is adequately constituted and exhibits all the skills needed for a project.

Relevant Personal Experiences

From personal experience, transitioning into a scrum framework for agile implementation solves most of the challenges experienced under traditional project management setups. Becoming a part of the team entails a focus on teamwork and collaboration. There is proper communication on the part of the product owner on the project specifications and goals. When such information passes to the scrum master, the project design gets scrutinized to determine the resources, how the resources will be shared, and the skills required to deliver the project. Further, there is a continuous evaluation of each sprint with the advantage of the scrum master being part of the project throughout its development phase.

Conclusion

The scrum framework for agile development recognizes three roles; product owner, development team, and scrum master. The three roles are valuable to the agile development process in the sense that they allow rapid development through incremental, iterative processes. Whereas project manager roles are not captured directly in the scrum framework, the traditional project manager roles are distributed among the three roles to allow for a collaborative environment. The product owner acts as the project manager. However, most of the soft skills required for successful project management also apply to the scrum framework.

References

CollabNet. (2013). Agile Tips: Project Manager Role [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IScE_EKrI0o

Sullivan, K. (2017, December 20). Scrum Framework Team Roles and How Project Management Activities Are Distributed. Retrieved July 14, 2020, from https://www.projectmanagement.com/articles/425207/Scrum-Framework-Team-Roles-and-How-Project-Management-Activities-Are-Distributed

Przybilla, L., Wiesche, M., & Krcmar, H. (2019, June). Emergent Leadership in Agile Teams--an Initial Exploration. In Proceedings of 2019 on Computers and People Research Conference (pp. 176-179).

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Manuel_Wiesche/publication/333771908_Emergent_Leadership_in_Agile_Teams--an_Initial_Exploration/links/5d08dc55299bf1f539cbcc9c/Emergent-Leadership-in-Agile-Teams--an-Initial-Exploration.pdf