Adapting to Agile: Growing Pains in a Self-Organizing Team

Wilson is a Digital Business Analyst in Melbourne, Australia.

  Agile   New Practitioners   Scrum  

My firm recently wanted my scrum team to align closer to the principles and practices of the Scaled Agile Framework®, so I was invited to attend a training course with some colleagues. After one year of practicing SAFe in “real life,” I would like to share my observations of agile adoption in my current software development project.

The structure of people is as follows:

• Project manager
• Product owner
• Scrum master
• Scrum team members

I am one of the scrum team members in a business analyst role. At first, I wondered if both a project manager role and a scrum master role were necessary. Traditionally, project managers lead waterfall methodology projects from start to finish; they oversee things like scope management and schedule management. But increasingly, agile methodologies have become popular for handling projects. Agile is meant to deliver incremental value to the customer earlier and to more easily accommodate changes.

By definition, there is no project manager role in agile, as mentioned by the trainer in the course I attended. Instead, there are only three roles: product owner, scrum master and scrum team members.

In my current project, many activities are done by the scrum master. I interact with them frequently in regular scrum events such as daily stand-ups, backlog refinement sessions, sprint review sessions and sprint …

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