We Can't Fix Every Problem

(As a reminder, last post said that a Scrum Master should protect a team from both dysfunctional management and the team becoming complacent and thinking they’d become good enough.)

I was inundated with replies asking me how to solve such dysfunctional management challenges as:

• An impossible, imposed deadline
• An incredibly junior team that needs to perform at expert level now to meet an impossible deadline
• Management who thinks they’re doing Scrum when they assign work to the team
• Management who holds the team accountable for their sprint plan but then adds 50 percent more work during the sprint
• Product owners who won’t tell the team what to work on next, but then yell during the sprint review when it’s the wrong thing
• And more. Yes, more. I feel compelled to point this out: We cannot fix every problem.

We owe it to our employers to try. But our employers owe us a culture in which we can succeed.

When they don’t provide that culture, we have limited options.

First, we should try to expose the problem (or the effects of the problem) to others who may be in a better position to address the issue.

If that fails, we either need to accept the status quo or move on.

If, for example, you are excited to build a strong agile team but the organization assigns your team a product owner who insists on telling the team what to do and has no willingness to change or improve, you probably aren’t going to be successful.

Try to educate the person. Try to persuade the person. Expose the bad behavior to stakeholders with the hope of garnering support there.

If none of that works, accept that you’re in a position you cannot change. Perhaps you can wait it out.

But if you think not, you may need to change jobs or perhaps even the company.

But at some point we all need to acknowledge we can’t fix every problem.

Famous vaudeville comedian W. C. Fields once offered this advice: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.”

Focus your energy on things you can affect. And accept or move on from the unfortunate things in our work environments you cannot.

You can be successful.

But not every company culture will let you succeed with agile.