Dev Team - Resolving Internal personal conflicts
A Development Team gets into a situation where a conflicting team members' behaviour causes issues to progress. Who is responsible for removing this issue?
You indicate that the development team should resolve this themselves. I believe that is way to simplistic yes ideally the development team would resolve this but I am not sure the word responsible is correct.. I think the Scrum Master is the one that will be responsible for this. The Scrum Master works with the team facilitating, coaching, mentoring, etc And I would guess eventually if all avenues are exhausted functional managers would have to take action.
An opinion from one of the PSM prep sites indicates this.
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As we know from Scrum Guide the Scrum Master serves the Development Team in coaching in self-organization and cross-functionality and removing impediments to the Development Team’s progress. In this case, the Scrum Master is responsible to educate the Dev Team for resolving all issues (incl. conflicts). But only Dev Team is responsible to remove this issue(conflict).
Hello Tom,
I guess it is correct. SM should teach Development Team to resolve different issues and be-self organize. Definitely SM has to do everything possible to try Development Team to resolve conflict but he/she is not a "mummy" :) All conflicts inside Development Team must be resolved by Development Team.
The values of courage, openness, and respect are supposed to be lived by all members of the Scrum Team - the Product Owner, the Scrum Master, and the Development Team. When there are issues that arise between anyone on the Scrum Team, they should have the courage to face them and have open, honest, and respectful discussions of the problem and come to a conclusion. However, the Scrum Guide also says that one of the responsibilities of the Scrum Master is to remove the impediments to the Development Team's progress. The Scrum Master is a servant-leader, a facilitator, and a coach to the team. A Scrum Master should have the skills to help resolve conflicts if called upon by the team. If the Scrum Master is not in a position to help resolve the conflicts, then facilitation may be going outside the Scrum Team to find someone who can help to resolve the conflict.
I wrote a blog post about this a few years ago:
https://dzone.com/articles/agile-teamwork-practice
The Scrum Master’s role in such matters has always been controversial, and the degree to which he or she ought to be involved depends upon the particular context.
Another take for me is that most internal conflicts are not going to be technical in manner. From what I have observed and from my own past personal experiences the young techno geek is not likely to see or understand what is the real reason behind the conflict. In my earlier years I would base everything on pure technical items not taking into account items in ones personal life could be the root cause.
Resolving a simple conflict within the team would be very appropriate however more complex conflict would have the risk of people getting hurt. Thus, I would still hold true that the scrum master should be responsible for this type of internal team conflict resolution even if the actual resolution is done by the team itself.