Faking Scrum
This week, the team get a training on Scrum. The goal was to introduce more agility in our development methodology. After this training, managers decided to use Scrum as Agile methodology, starting in 2 weeks for our neqw internal release. That sounds good.
The team is about 18 developers and QA engineers. Scrum recommende to have about 7 folks per group. This imply to split the team into smaller groups. The current oganization is really not agile; this not so suprizing as we kept the same organization for around 11 years and we are Agile practitioners only for 3 years. So the team in splitted into 3 blocks: QA and 2 development groups (business and platform). My concern is that we keep the same organization on re-grade the existing manager as ScrumMasters. I think this is faking Scrum for 3 reasons.
First, teams are supposed to be cross-functional, which is not the case today.
The ScrumMaster is supposed to be a facilitator/moderator and contribute to the features development as the other members of the group. The existing managers do not have such contribution. More over the ScrumMaster is not supposed to have any authority, which makes very difficult the association of manager and ScrumMaster roles for one person.
And last; self-organization of the team is a fundamental of Scrum. I do not see any of that in a re-organization fully handled by managers.
I hope we will go throw a different path: let the team re-organize itself by involving every members and do not fake Scrum.