Do individuals matter in Scrum Teams?

An Organization becomes empowered by individuals who have the required information, skill and desire to individually succeed in a way that will help in collective organizational growth.

Inability or perceived inability to take an active role in organizational process results in bringing down the motivational level among people working in that organization. When individuals are not empowered, it leads to falling back to methodologies and work processes.

However, Scrum has a complete different view towards the standard approach in that it emphasises on putting responsibility of problem solving to a self-managed team. Scrum believes that people dealing with problems are the appropriate people to find a solution to it.

Usually a self -organized team issues takes local into account irrespective of the solution, design or approach the team comes up with. So, when things get worst, the teams are committed to make things work as it is their decision. If it were someone else’s decision they would be less interested. Current and relevant knowledge helps them to come up with better solutions to problems they face.

Majority of problems faced by Organizations and teams are very complex. So, ideas or solutions against such problems involve increased level of complexity which cannot be solved by a single individual. Therefore, companies need to encourage synergy of motivated minds where the value of combined effect is greater than the sum of their separate effects.

In a self-managing team everyone is responsible for the collective team performance. There is nowhere to hide in a self-managing team. Nobody can hide in a self –managing team and no one is going to take the fall for the other.

Self-organizing team in true sense can increase the performance, motivation and satisfaction level among the individuals involved. Therefore, improving the performance of the organization overall. Suitable deliverables along with self-managed team synergy provides a win: win situation.

However,  in order to realize the benefits of self –managed team, we need to have a conducive or productive environment , a culture where the people believes in all information is good information and that everyone did the best. What matters most is the success of the projects on which the team is working and the organisation that the team is a part of.

Success of Scrum is dependent on self-organized teams. However, it is not always possible to manage self-organized teams .Self-organizing teams require constant self as well as peer reviews to perform well.