Scrum is at the vanguard of a major shift in the management paradigm. The new paradigm is called Radical Management, based on Steve Denning’s book of the same name. What is this shift and how does Scrum fit in?
This shift is due to a fundamental change in the marketplace. Due to globalization, customers now have incredible freedom about whom they choose to do business with. In order to keep customers, companies have to do more than just keep their customers satisfied. They have to delight their customers!
This shift impacts the five dimensions of management: Purpose of the Company, Role of Management, Accountability, Basic Values, and Communications.
Old: Maximize profits or shareholder value (or more recently, maximize management compensation)
New: Delight the customer
How Scrum does it: The product owner represents interest of the users, customers, and other stakeholders to the team doing the work. The product backlog is a list of items which bring value to the customer or value, sequenced according to their value to the customer or user. Customer value must be produced every 30 days in a potentially shippable form.
Old: Manager as controller
New: Manager as enabler
How Scrum does it: Scrum defines two leadership roles, the ScrumMaster and the Product Owner. Both are servant leader roles. The Product Owner defines the value to be produced for the customer, prioritizes the work and accepts the work. The ScrumMaster helps both Product Owner and Implementation Team work together more effectively, by eliminating impediments and helping the team improve.
Old: Bureaucracy and blame
New: Dynamic Linking (I prefer ‘direct linking’) in which the people doing the work have a clear line of sight to the beneficiaries of the work.
How Scrum does it: Inspect and adapt is a core principle of Scrum. Scrum provide numerous occasions at the personal, team and product/project level. Sprint Planning – what should be produced in this iteration? Sprint Review – what was produced, does it meat expectations, and what corrections are necessary? Daily Scrum – what is preventing us from achieving our goal for this sprint. Sprint Retrospective – how can we improve how we work so that we can be more productive? Release Planning (if appropriate) – how do we meet our goal of delivering something valuable to the customer?
Old: Efficiency and Cost Cutting
New: Sustainable values
How Scrum does it: Scrum does not micromanage individual people and tasks but rather gives teams complete problems to solve until done. Sustainable pace is assured by giving the team doing the work the authority to decide how much work it can take on.
Old: Command and Control (or more precisely detailed command and control)
New: Adult to adult conversations
How Scrum does it: To plan work, the Product Owner and Scrum Implementation Team come together as equals. The Product Owner has jurisdiction over priorities and acceptance criteria, and the team has jurisdiction over estimates, how much work they can accept in a sprint, and how to do the work. With the help of the ScrumMaster, the team and P-O meet and plan the work for the next increment. Neither the Product Owner nor the ScrumMaster has detailed command authority over the team or each other, but through their defined roles, they guide the team to a successful outcome.
Like Radical Management, Scrum must be implemented more or less in its entirety, otherwise it will disintegrate over time. Scrum is surely not the only way to do Radical Management, but it implements the principles quite thoroughly and, in my experience, is an excellent place to start.
Are you delighting your customers? Is your company agile enough for the 21st century? Join Steve Denning and myself at our web-based monthly mashup call-in show on Making the Entire Organization Agile.
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
cookielawinfo-checkbox-advertisement | 1 year | Set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin, this cookie is used to record the user consent for the cookies in the "Advertisement" category . |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional | 11 months | The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". |
viewed_cookie_policy | 11 months | The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data. |
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
mailchimp_landing_site | 1 month | The cookie is set by MailChimp to record which page the user first visited. |
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
CONSENT | 2 years | YouTube sets this cookie via embedded youtube-videos and registers anonymous statistical data. |
_ga | 2 years | The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. The cookie stores information anonymously and assigns a randomly generated number to recognize unique visitors. |
_gat_gtag_UA_42152348_1 | 1 minute | Set by Google to distinguish users. |
_gcl_au | 3 months | Provided by Google Tag Manager to experiment advertisement efficiency of websites using their services. |
_gid | 1 day | Installed by Google Analytics, _gid cookie stores information on how visitors use a website, while also creating an analytics report of the website's performance. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. |
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
NID | 6 months | NID cookie, set by Google, is used for advertising purposes; to limit the number of times the user sees an ad, to mute unwanted ads, and to measure the effectiveness of ads. |
test_cookie | 15 minutes | The test_cookie is set by doubleclick.net and is used to determine if the user's browser supports cookies. |
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE | 5 months 27 days | A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface. |
YSC | session | YSC cookie is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages. |
yt-remote-connected-devices | never | YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video. |
yt-remote-device-id | never | YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video. |
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
COMPASS | 1 hour | No description |
cookies.js | session | No description available. |
S | 1 hour | No description available. |