Mission Control

The well-known The Chicken and The Pig story is used with reference to Scrum more often than with reference of anything else, I believe. Despite its wide perception of just being a silly story, the metaphor makes lots of sense in various aspects of software development. As Michael Vizdos mentioned, you can’t be Pig & Chicken by the same time.

The problem is even more vivid in outsourcing. As a middleman, you are committed before your clients; yet you certainly do not want to become the control freak. But how do you keep all the balls in the air? Juggling team motivation, statuses, priorities, risks, technical choices, client’s expectations etc. etc. isn’t piece of cake. Drop one of the balls – and you are likely to witness the domino effect on the others.

Your commitments before clients make your self-determination easy: you likely cannot afford to be just a contributor on the project.

My (gained through multiple failures) approach – don’t let others be _just_ contributing. Let people juggle with you. Let them see all of the balls in the air. Let them commit – this is what any one of us needs to be happy about his job anyway. In other words, make sure you don’t have Chickens in your core team (remember – you can’t be both: you are either totally involved as Pig or _just_ watching as Chicken).

In most cases, you would achieve this by losing some of the control over project. In this case you risk becoming contributor yourself. It’s a double-edged sword (but I guess you’ve understood the complexity by now).

There is no silver bullet on how to stay in control without being a control freak. If it was a rule of thumb to segregate “What to do” and “How to do” questions, it would have been much easier: you just focus on what to do and have others commit by allowing them to making decisions on how to do it.

However, there is one thing that would help you out. This thing is to remember the platitude fact that “all people are different”. We all come from a different background and with a varying comfort level for the commitment. Your goal as the Scrum master would be to make the overall commitment level grow, by growing the commitment of each individual. As the commitment grows – you just share some of your balls in the air with others. You iterate as long as it is needed to get the following picture in the project team:

Hey, if you see me being control freak at times – pls, pock me into the case and we will discuss. I probably have my reasons (such as, say, considering you under-committed) – but worth a discussion anyway. Thanks!