TL; DR: Why Too Much Transparency Can Have a Detrimental Effect
While transparency is often touted as essential in Agile, too much can have negative consequences. Oversharing can lead to micromanagement, misinterpretation, and loss of trust within the team. Examples include excessive scrutiny during Daily Scrums, misreading progress metrics, and creating a blame culture that erodes psychological safety.
Strategic opacity may sometimes be necessary to protect the team’s autonomy and maintain a healthy dynamic. Be transparent, but not at the expense of the team’s independence and well-being.
Scrum is just a tool; your job is to solve real customer problems and deliver value. Stop focusing on perfecting frameworks and start prioritizing outcomes that matter. It’s time to reassess what truly drives your success, particularly given the challenging business environment.
Suppose you are a Scrum Master or Agile Coach. Have you recently been asked to explain your contribution to the organization’s value creation? In other words, does management want to know whether you are pulling your weight or if your salary is an expendable expenditure? This article points to ten quick Scrum gains you can pull off without asking for permission or budget to prove your contribution to your organization’s survival in these challenging times.
Are there agile regulated industries, or is that an oxymoron?
Recently, I received a project alert from an organization looking for a Scrum Master with “at least two years knowledge of information systems for rail and public transport travelers.”
Now, if you go through the job description, they do not seem to look for a Scrum Master but a project manager and glorified Jira clerk. If that is the case, why don’t they say so but pretend there is such a thing as agile regulated industries?
Imagine your team’s line manager insists that a successful team improves velocity regularly. How could you, as a team, satisfy this strange, unsuitable demand without working more? How can you make gaming velocity a reality?
I run this exercise with my students of entry-level Scrum Master and Product Owner classes to help them reflect on the tricky nature of measuring success, metrics, and, of course, Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
For the following article, I aggregated suggestions from more than 50 classes on how to “best” game velocity.
Stakeholders often regard Scrum and other agile teams as cost centers, primarily focused on executing projects within budgetary confines. This conventional view, however, undervalues their strategic potential. If we reconsider agile teams as investors—carefully allocating their resources to optimize returns—they can significantly impact an organization’s strategic objectives and long-term profitability.
This perspective not only redefines their role but also enhances the effectiveness of their contributions to the business by solving the customers’ problems.
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