After watching this video, you'll be able to describe why placing existing people in new roles without training will lead to failure. So I'd like to discuss some organizational things that people do when they're trying to become agile, that do lead to failure, and one is placing people in a new role without giving them training. So the product manager becomes the product owner. There's a big difference here, the product manager is a job title. The product owner is a scrum role. They may be the same person, they may not be the same person. Then I see the project manager becoming the scrum master with no training on how to be a scrum master. And finally, the development team becomes a scrum team. But they're just software engineers. There's no testers on the team. There's no ops people on the team. There's no business analysts or anything on the team. So let's look a little deeper into why doing these things leads to failure. First, there's the product manager becoming the product owner. The product manager is usually a business person who manages the budget, they may or may not have a vision for how things are going. But the product owner is the visionary who leads the team in a series of experiments designed to achieve whatever the sprint goal is. And these are not often the same sets of skills, you need to be more focused on where to take the product, then how to manage the budget. And also, the product managers usually the person, they're focused on operational aspects of the business, Right? Instead of being a conduit between the stakeholders and the team, translating those business requirements into the technical goals that the team needs to achieve. So just be careful. Some project product managers are good at being product owners, some of them are not just understand why one of them is a job title. The other one is a role in scrum, and it may not be the same person. The next thing is the project manager becoming the scrum master. It's key to understand how project managers work. Our project manager is a task manager, they keep everyone marching to a plan. You know, when I teach Agile, quite often I'll get someone in the back of the room who's watching me do our sprint planning and creating our Kanban board and they'll say, "Excuse me, how do I know when I've assigned too much work to somebody?" And the answer is, you don't assign work to anyone. That's why there's no way to tell, right? They're a self managing team they assign work to themselves. So it's a very different job role being a scrum master, where you're a coach that keeps the team focused on the current sprint on being self managed. The other big difference between a project manager and a scrum master is that when the project manager feels that you have an impediment, they document the risk in their little spreadsheet, right? This is what they do, they document risks. And so if I've got a problem, I've got some blockage, the project manager is gonna say, "What are you going to do to unblock yourself." As opposed to a scrum master that eliminates impediments while buffering the team from interruptions. And so if the team says, "I have an impediment," the scrum master should say, "Let me handle that for you, you go work on something more productive. And let me get that out of your way." Project managers will almost never say that. So it really takes a different kind of person to take the role of scrum master than the way project managers were taught to manage projects to a plan and document risks. And finally, it's the development team versus the scrum team. I mean, a development team is usually just software engineers, right? Just developers. But a scrum team is a cross functional team. It includes developers and testers and security people and business analysts and ops, anybody that we need to go build an increment. So it's very important that you reorganize, and you create cross functional development teams, not just a group of software engineers. This is my favorite quote from Bill Cantor, "Until and unless business leaders accept the idea that they are no longer managing project with fixed functions, timeframes, and costs as they did with Waterfall, they will struggle to use Agile as it was designed to be used." So the roles have changed. You can't put people in a new role without giving them training, right. Otherwise, a project manager will try as hard as they might to turn a combine board into a Gantt chart, because that's all they know, is managing projects with Gantt charts. Very important that this mindset has to come down from upper management, upper management cannot be asking you to predict things way far into the future. Instead of asking what are you going to get done by the end of the year they should be saying what are you going to do in the next two weeks? How are you going to delight my customers at the end of the next sprint? In this video, you learn that placing existing people in new roles without the proper training will lead to failure because Agile roles need a different focus and new priorities. The Agile mindset must be adopted by management.
