One of my favorite exercises from my Professional Scrum Master classes is how to best sabotage a Scrum Master as a member of the middle management. The exercise rules are simple: You’re not allowed to use any form of illegal activity. So, outsourcing the task to a bunch of outlaws is out of the question. Instead, you are only allowed to use practices that are culturally acceptable within your organization.
Read on and learn more on how to best sabotage a Scrum Master from the exercise results of more than twenty PSM I and PSM II classes. (I slightly edited the suggestions for better readability.)
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The exercise is based on a Liberating Structure microstructure called TRIZ.
Here is the briefing for the participants; typically, they have a five-minute timebox to come up with suggestions and observations in a workgroup of three to five people.
Please note that only legal and culturally accepted practices qualify as a good outcome.
Once we accomplish the first part of the exercise—aggregating sabotaging practices—the workgroup then identifies those practices to sabotage Scrum Masters they have already witnessed, followed by identifying possible ways to counter these practices.
You can categorize the results from the before-mentioned classes into six groups:
The first category of how to best sabotage a Scrum Master is generally about disqualifying Scrum itself as a helpful framework or introducing changes to conflict with the first principles of Scrum:
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The next bucket of useful sabotage practices are metrics, OKRs, KPIs — you name it. Just turn your Scrum Master into a glorified data-entry clerk with a challenging reporting burden:
If a challenging reporting burden does not help, sabotage your Scrum Master by actively undermining their activities to turn a group of people into a cross-functional Scrum Team:
If you are already messing with the Scrum Team team-building process, why not place a few obstacles into the Scrum Team’s way of working? Sabotage your Scrum Master by creating unachievable objectives while meddling with the very foundation of Scrum:
Does your Scrum Master have an insatiable appetite for data, information, and knowledge? Well, keep them out of the loop then. What could be an easier way of sabotaging Scrum:
Finally, ensure that everyone on the Scrum Team understands that your events are more important than theirs:
Every middle manager has ample opportunity to sabotage Scrum Masters. Moreover, most of the time, it will be unlikely that others will identify these practices as deliberate obstruction. Providing the benefit of the doubt and assuming positive intent, they probably get away with it. Therefore, reading these signals early in the process is vital to us agile practitioners.
What practices to sabotage Scrum Masters have you observed? Please share your learnings with us in the comments.
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