Does accepting greater responsibility mean delivering greater value?

Does accepting greater responsibility mean delivering greater value?

Scrum believes that employees are self-motivated and seek to accept greater responsibility. So, they

deliver much greater value when self-organized.

The preferred leadership style in Scrum is “servant leadership”, which emphasizes achieving results by

focusing on the needs of the Scrum Team.

Benefits of Self-Organization

Self-organization as an essential principle in Scrum leads to the following:

• Team buy-in and shared ownership

• Motivation, which leads to an enhanced performance level of the team

• Innovative and creative environment conducive to growth

Self-organization does not mean that team members are allowed to act in any manner that they want

to. It just means that once the Product Vision is defined in Create Project Vision process, the Product

Owner, Scrum Master, and the Scrum Team get identified. And the Scrum Core Team itself works

very closely with relevant Stakeholder(s) for refining requirements better as they go through the

Develop Epic(s) and Create User Stories process. Team expertise is used to assess the inputs needed to

execute the planned work of the project. This judgment and expertise are applied to all technical and

management aspects of the project during the Create Deliverables process.

Although prioritization is primarily done by the Product Owner who represents the Voice of Customer,

the self-organized Scrum Team is involved in task breakdown and estimation during the Create

Tasks and Estimate Tasks processes. During these processes, each team member is responsible for

determining what work he/she will be doing. Suring the execution of a Sprint, if team members need

any help with completing their tasks, Scrum addresses this through the regular interaction mandatory

with the Daily Standup Meetings. The Scrum Team itself interacts with other teams through the Scrum

of Scrums Meetings and can look for additional guidance as required from the Scrum Guidance Body.

Finally, the Scrum Team and Scrum Master work closely to demonstrate the product increment created

during the Sprint in the Demonstrate and Validate Sprint process where properly completed deliverables

are accepted. Since the Deliverables are potentially shippable, (and the Prioritized Product Backlog is

prioritized by User Stories in the order of value created by them), the Product Owner and the customer

can clearly visualize and articulate the value being created after every Sprint; and Scrum Teams in turn

have the satisfaction of seeing their hard work being accepted by the customer and other stakeholders.