A client who is basing their scrum adoption on the LeSS scaling framework recently sent me the following question about the role of manager in Large-Scale Scrum.

Question

I’ve read that when scaling scrum with LeSS, cross-functional teams need to have one manager. The author advocated strongly for this, but in reality, I’ve seen this fail miserably. Losing the domain owner causes the group to skew heavily to the bias of the team manager, as well as lose the ability to strongly drive and foster domain expertise. I’ve seen product people be appointed, and the tech goes to pot. Also, I’ve seen technical people not want to report up through product. I’ve seen engineers as team managers, but it’s rare to find good engineering/product people, and you have the reverse problem. I’m not completely convinced that a team manager is a good idea. Chris, what are your thoughts?
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Sprint planning is the first event of each sprint. Doing it well will align the scrum team and set a course for success. Doing it poorly will waste time, energy, and team morale. Here’s how a product owner can prepare for a successful sprint planning meeting.
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To prioritize items in a scrum team’s product backlog, the product owner needs an estimate of both value and cost for each item. This way, they can identify which items have high ROI and move them to the top of the backlog. Other concerns such as dependencies must be considered, but in general the team should always be working on the product backlog item (PBI) with the highest ROI.

This makes sense. And yet, most organizations don’t have estimates for the value of the items in their scrum teams’ product backlogs. Why this glaring omission? I believe that it is due to several common myths, or misunderstandings, about the nature of business value.
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Question

The developers on our scrum team are done with a story (product backlog item). Then defects are found during QA testing. Do we count it done? What about the defects?
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Scrum strikes a useful balance between flexibility and focus. In sprint planning, the product owner presents the most important objectives to the development team. The development team commits to as many of those as they believe they can deliver in the sprint. Once sprint planning is over, the business doesn’t change their mind about what they want. The development team is able to focus on delivering the product backlog items to which they committed. At the beginning of the next sprint, the business has another opportunity to change direction in any way they need to.

Every so often something comes up that can’t wait until the next sprint cycle. This could be a problem that has arisen, such as customers not being able to log in. It could be a business emergency such as needing a feature rushed into production in order to land a new client. Such unplanned work is the subject of something that I call “the emergency protocol.” The emergency protocol isn’t an official part of scrum, but it’s a useful addition that many organizations choose to adopt.
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