[teampractices] Scrum of scrums

[Erik Moeller]

On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 11:19 AM, Amir E. Aharoni
<amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> 2013/9/18 Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org>
>> (which is a recipe for failure, IMO, because managers generally are
>> not nearly sufficiently involved in the day-to-day workings of a
>> team).

> To clarify: Do you refer here to product managers or to team directors?
> And in both cases: is this the right and the expected condition?

Responding belatedly - I was referring to engineering managers
(directors). Engineering managers supporting scrum teams tend to be at
least one step removed from a team's day-to-day work, and that is by
design; their job is to support the team from a bit of distance
(resourcing, individual development, process support, etc.). But that
distance also means that having them act as go-betweens on day-to-day
work is rarely a good idea. This is all consistent with the Scrum
Alliance take on the subject at
http://www.scrumalliance.org/community/articles/2008/july/the-manager-s-role-in-agile
, although we're still a bit more aspirational in that regard since
our adoption of scrum is inconsistent and incomplete.

As for product managers, they are very much full-fledged members of a
team, and should be able to take on coordination tasks that fall into
their bailiwick. Whether they should participate in a scrum-of-scrums
is, IMO, a matter of a bit of experimentation; if the goal is to
quickly identify technical blockers and cross-team issues, then
they're probably the wrong group to assemble, which is why e.g.
http://www.scrumalliance.org/community/articles/2007/may/advice-on-conducting-the-scrum-of-scrums-meeting
recommends that the scrum-of-scrum representative be a technical
implementer on the team.

Erik

-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation