When Agile Principles Became a Fight With the System | Deborah Colombari

Deborah Colombari: When Agile Principles Became a Fight With the System

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes .

 

"I was trying to go against the system, but you cannot go against the system." - Deborah Colombari

 

Deborah Colombari's Scrum Master journey started with a sense that Agile gave her permission to work differently. After early project management work, a year in Canada exposed her to Agile, and the Scrum Master role soon "felt like a glove." But her failure story starts when a supportive leader left and a more command-driven manager arrived. Deborah pushed back hard, trying to protect the Agile practices she believed were right: dailies, burn-down and burn-up charts, transparency, and team focus. The problem was that she was fighting the manager instead of first understanding the system around him. That conflict spilled into the team and damaged morale. Looking back, Deborah says she would now sit down with the manager first, understand the goals and pressures behind the change, and look for compromise before escalating into resistance. Her key learning was pragmatic: Scrum Masters need principles, but they also need diplomacy. The work is not only helping the team inside the Agile bubble, but also translating between that bubble and the wider organization.

 

In this episode, we refer to ITIL , the Dunning-Kruger effect , and Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows .

 

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