Feature image taken from the new self-guided course, "Effective Stakeholder Collaboration For Scrum Teams"
I have seen and heard many examples where teams are “doing Scrum right”, yet are not achieving the outcomes that they and their stakeholders desire. All of the Scrum events are in place, the Scrum Team works from an ordered Product Backlog, they have a Definition of Done and regularly produce usable Increments. And yet somehow, Sprint after Sprint, there is frustration in the team and their stakeholders. Very often, the root cause isn’t the Scrum framework; it’s how the Scrum Team is collaborating with stakeholders.
Scrum lays out the accountabilities of the Scrum Master, Product Owner and Developers. Scrum guides us in the purpose of the events and who attends, and which artifacts to maintain, all in pursuit of empiricism.
However, in reality, Scrum does little to guide teams when it comes to the human side of working with people. It is often the relationships that Scrum Teams have with people who hold the money and the power in organisations that can impact the Scrum Team most. It is in these relationships that Scrum Teams often find themselves stumbling.
Stakeholder Gaps
Common responses as to why Scrum Teams are struggling are often things like, “Stakeholders don’t understand Scrum”, “The Product Owner isn’t empowered”, “There are too many conflicting priorities.” Meanwhile, comments from people outside of the team include, “the Scrum Team doesn’t deliver what we asked for”, “the Scrum Team is completely unpredictable,” and “the Scrum Team is too slow”.
While any of these things may be true, they are often symptoms of the deeper problem of collaboration between the Scrum Team and the stakeholders. In some cases, Scrum Teams are not even able to identify who their stakeholders are, and the people that really matter for the direction of the Scrum Team’s product remain invisible. Effective Scrum Teams understand all of the different types of stakeholders for their product, from those whose focus is on the detail of features, to those who look at how it aligns with business strategy.
Regardless if teams within organisations are using Scrum, collaboration across boundaries is often opaque, messy, political, and nuanced. Scrum Teams cannot inspect and adapt their way out of a system where stakeholder collaboration is ineffective without some real skill, empathy, and strategy.
Why We Built The Stakeholder Collaboration For Scrum Teams Course
In my engagements with teams and in the classroom of my training courses, individuals and teams know something isn’t working and have been asking for help. The advice that they are often getting is to “be more empirical”, or they are told about the purpose of the Scrum events and how to facilitate them. This advice helps treat some of the symptoms of the Scrum Team’s problems, but it doesn’t address root causes and stop the recurring frustrations of conflicting priorities, unclear expectations and chaos that can derail whole Sprints.
I built Effective Stakeholder Collaboration for Scrum Teams with Glaudia Califano, my business partner at Red Tangerine and fellow Professional Scrum Trainer. This new self-paced online course is endorsed by Scrum.org. Our motivation was to address a gap that we felt not enough people were talking about. This course is centred on understanding the stakeholders that Scrum Teams work with, the pressures they face and how teams can adapt their approach to stakeholder collaboration to get to mutual understanding, genuine alignment and effective collaboration in order to build products of real value.
The course focuses on real behaviours, practical strategies, and situational judgment. We’ve used techniques from the course ourselves in many organisations for building empathy and trust, fostering shared ownership and navigating complexity. People who take the course will learn approaches and techniques that enable Scrum Teams to move forward and progress towards achieving the outcomes that they and their stakeholders truly desire.
What’s At Stake
Research has shown:
- Many Scrum Teams struggle to understand the needs of stakeholders1
- Inadequate stakeholder engagement, trust, communication, participation, and identification are among the most significant barriers to successful delivery2
- Insufficient collaboration between stakeholders and teams creates pressure to over-commit, problems in gathering, clarifying and prioritising requirements, causes delays in feedback and lower productivity3
Ineffective collaboration between Scrum Teams and stakeholders is expensive, exhausting and demoralizing. Scrum Teams burn out and lose their creativity to solve complex problems. Product Owners get stuck in endless debates about prioritisation rather than focusing on value. Developers lose focus. The impacts are waste and the slow erosion of trust between teams and the organisation, ultimately affecting the customer experience.
A Call to Action
Success with Scrum does not come from implementing the accountabilities, events and artefacts alone. In complex product development, success comes from understanding people, context and human dynamics, and applying that understanding in real time.
That’s what this course is all about. We developed it to help individuals and teams navigate the human side of product development that so often trips them up. We developed it because Scrum Teams need tools, techniques, and practical ways to collaborate across boundaries, across priorities, and across personalities. They need guidance on how to be effective with stakeholders outside of the Scrum Team who hold so much influence over what gets built and whether the product is a success.
Our course isn’t purely theoretical. While we introduce theoretical concepts and approaches, we bring them to life throughout the course with interactive activities based on a case study that runs throughout the course. Completing the course will help students appreciate the collaboration opportunities that Scrum provides even more while developing their collaboration skills.
I hope that Effective Stakeholder Collaboration for Scrum Teams achieves our goals and serves as a valuable contribution to the way Scrum Teams work.
1. Verwijs, C., & Russo, D. (2022). A Theory of Scrum Team Effectiveness. Published in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM).DOI: 10.1145/3571849
2. Ullah, N. (2023). “Effects of Project Failure Towards Stakeholders: A Review …” (MPRA paper 118721)
3. Hoda, R., Noble, J., & Marshall, S. (2011). The impact of inadequate customer collaboration on self-organizing Agile teams. Information and Software Technology, 53(5), 521–534