Make Your Scrum Team More Effective With Management Support

5 Do-it-yourself workshops to make your Scrum team more successful by collaborating with management

Research shows that management support is essential for Scrum teams to be successful. And that makes sense. It isn’t always easy to work effectively as a team and to deliver working increments to your stakeholders frequently. Support from management is vital to overcome those challenges. From research, we know that the most useful thing management can do is to support the autonomy of Scrum teams, to allow and support Scrum teams to work as closely with stakeholders as possible, and to create an environment where learning is part of work.

Our data tells us that as management becomes more supportive and available to resolve impediments, the more satisfied stakeholders are, the more value is delivered by teams and the higher team morale is. But to what extent does your team experience support from management? Are they available for help? Do they frequently check in with teams? What is management in your organization doing to contribute to the success of the Scrum teams?

We created a number of do-it-yourself workshops to help you find an answer to these questions. All of the workshops include a step-by-step approach to use them and help you move in the right direction.

The workshops and experiments are:

In this blog post, we offer you a short description of these workshops. We hope it inspires you to give them a try. Once you’ve used them, let us know the results, let’s learn and grow, together!

When organizations decide to work empirically (with Scrum), they don’t always realize how much changes because of that. Developers need to be able to work much more closely with their stakeholders; actual users and customers. Scrum teams need a high degree of autonomy so they can rapidly respond to situations that are unfolding, without having to wait for permission from high up the hierarchy. And those are just a few of the many impediments in the environment of Scrum teams.

Without support from their environment, and from management, it will be exceedingly hard for Scrum teams to be effective. Managers often have the power and the means to change the environment and to take away those impediments. But if that support lacks, morale tends to decrease as teams discover they can’t really do what Scrum teams do.

At the same time, we see that many Scrum teams limit their improvements to what happens within their team, and don’t actively use formal and informal networks to leverage the support that *is* available in their environment. So we designed this do-it-yourself workshop to help your team do just that, and find much-needed support.

In some organizations, Scrum is implemented in a top-down fashion by management. In other organizations, teams start experimenting with Scrum and it moves up into the organization. Or it is a mix of both.

In both cases, teams need a lot of support from their environment to make it work. For example, from management, from stakeholders, and from other departments like HR, sales, or finance.

Many of the challenges that make it hard to work empirically can’t be solved by Scrum teams themselves. For example, the organization uses a budgeting system that forces teams to make unrealistic forecasts. Or the sales department makes promises to customers that teams can’t live up to. Or management keeps reshuffling team composition, which results in stress, loss of productivity, and frustration.

While this harms productivity and the ability of teams to work empirically, it isn’t done on purpose. Often management, stakeholders, and supporting departments aren’t aware of the functional needs of Scrum teams.

The purpose of this do-it-yourself workshop is to explore essential needs and to give both the teams and their environment to make clear requests, and receive a clear answer to them.

It is next to impossible to succeed with Scrum if you don’t have support from the managers that shape the environment that you work in with your team. At the same, we know that such support is often lacking in many organizations.

We’ve found that this lack of support is more often a problem of communication than a problem of intent. Both managers and Scrum teams regularly don’t have a good structure to periodically ask for, and give, support where it is needed.

We designed this do-it-yourself workshop to create such a structure. In only an hour, managers can get a good sense of where their support is needed. Although the approach may be a new experience for many managers, we’ve found that they are usually blown away by the richness of the communication. The design of this workshop also lends itself to doing it frequently.

We’ve seen many organizations, and the pattern is usually the same. Scrum teams complain about management, and management complains about Scrum teams. It’s no surprise that the relationship between management and teams is often strained.

And while it is unfortunate, it is also not surprising. The role that managers play is quite different for Scrum teams than for departments or regular workgroups. More often than not, we’ve found that these mutual complaints often stem from a lack of understanding of each other’s position and needs.

So we designed this do-it-yourself workshop to create space for people to listen to each other on a personal level. We’ve consistently found that this lays the groundwork for more productive cooperation between management and teams.

Is the environment in your organization supportive of Scrum, or does it cause impediments? A common complaint, and frustration, among people who try to change behavior, is that it seems to be so incredibly hard. But one important insight from social and organizational psychologists is that the behavior of people in organizations is strongly shaped by the environment.

This is often called “the smell of the place”, and it gives you a sense of the culture of an organization. Although most of us are not always aware of this, the environment we work in shapes how we behave and feel. Just like most of us feel more inspired and energized in a fresh, lush forest than in the drab, concrete jungle of a metropolitan city in the scorching heat of summer. Re-energizing people often have a lot less to do with changing people, and a lot more with changing the context those people work in.

We designed this workshop with three overlapping goals. The first is to look at how your work environment shapes your behavior as individuals and as teams. The second is to turn this into a (simple) metric that you can track, and see if you’re heading in the right direction. And finally, our goal with this workshop is to involve those people in your environment who have the power to change it (like management).

Give it a try, and identify the smells in your environment!

We created these do-it-yourself workshops to support you in making your Scrum team more successful by collaborating with management. This is vital because research shows that management support is essential for Scrum teams to be successful. If you tried the workshops, let us know how it went. Your thoughts, ideas, and experiences are invaluable to us. Only together, we can create even more valuable content, and unleash the superpowers of Scrum Teams, all around the world!

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