Human & Technical Leadership in Scrum/Agile

[JM]

I looked for exiting posts on this and did not find anything.

My role is as the "tech lead", and my official title is senior staff software engineer, however with the things that fill my day I am not with the team writing code or being as intimate as they are with building the application. Going fwd with our new structure i do want to find time to as least be able to run the code on my machine, maybe do a little coding here and there, but overall at least have a high level overview on the code, structure, etc... mainly so that I am not an "Ivory Tower" leader, aka hands off.... I worked my way up from jr engineer to lead architect for large companies over the past 20+ years.

My role as defined is basically the same as when i was VP of Engineering for a smaller company. Now that were moving from not really any real process, to scrum, some of my younger team members feel they should not have any oversight or influence at all.  They basically see no role for anyone that is not a full time developer. Either your a product owner, scrum master, or software engineer.  So, I'm trying to get outsider opinions and recommendations on where leadership fits into a true scrum/agile environment where the team is "self managed".  To give some context, we are building a large cloud system that has the potential to collect terabytes of data per day, process and display it.  Aside from my Data Scientist, my entire dev team has about 5 years of experience, and in my opinion feel they know everything and can built anything no matter how big, fast, secure, etc... it needs to be, even though none of them have ever done this before.  It reminds me of one time at a startup where we had 5 senior people and a team of off shore resources, we had one sys admin who was told to build an email system that would compete with google, and he told the founder "Absolutely, i will build you an email system that will compare to gmail in scale and functionality". That company is non-existent now of course.  This to me is the "I know how to do everything and don't need any advice or help" aka "hero syndrome".

I have been a csm/cspo for a number of years, have had roles as software engineer, architect, PM, manager (long time ago), etc... for startups to fortune 50 companies, over a span of 22 years, and also have a passion around enterprise architecture, continuous improvement and lean/agile principals.  I am moving my teams to scrum now that we have built our protoype / mvp.   My goal is simply to be a technical coach and also a leader that drives the business and financial aspects, aligns high level strategic and product initiatives with what the team is building, make sure the team is striving for excellence and always improving, etc... Even this is being challenged by in-particularly one member on the team who has 5 years of experience, but also is very opinionated out load, clearly influencing the rest of the team.  His view is that anyone who is not a full time developer should have no say in architecture, tech stack, how the team operates, or anything that involves the team.  To give you some in-site, as we define our process, he refuses to accept that measuring progress in a sprint by velocity or hours, should have some influence from me and other business stake holders.  I tried to explain to him that breaking a story into tasks, assigning hours has nothing to do with micro management, but more of a way to think deeper about what needs to happen to create the story, what dependencies there may be, or anything else that may be overlooked as the story level.  It also will show progress and visibility at a finer level, where only going by if a story is done or not; and how the business uses this information.  

I am fully aware that there should be no central decision makers on the dev team, but also I don't feel this team where everyone has 5-7 years of experience at most, has the ability to think broadly enough about certain aspects of what we are building, the scope and long term needs, and overall nature of it all.  They want to jump into open source stacks without even understanding exactly what were building, long term scale, performance needs, security needs, etc., they refuse to use any type of cloud specific services as they say "it's not cloud agnostic" even though they have not looked at the financial impacts of each option and other opportunity costs, whether this application will ever have a need to be cloud agnostic, or if it even makes sense right now using the YAGNI approach.  I do recruiting, budgeting, work with legal team on NDA and on-boarding, meet with cloud vendors, recruiters, and  other leadership aspects to drive the direction, etc... and the way the team is self forming now, they want no over site or direction what soever.  I was specifically hired to be responsible for all aspects of the software side of this large project.  A lot of this is coming from the agile training i made the entire group (all depts and leaders) take.  It was great training, but was a total infusion of Scrum Kool-aide and every word is being taken literally and they want to adopt everything from day 1.  Things like No need for a dev manager (I agree there), and self managing team, are some of the drivers for what is happening.

I'm looking for feedback and thoughts after you read this.  Am I out of line here, is the dev team correct, and what should my role be?  We work within a billion dollar company, but are some what disconnected as we are venturing into a new market.  Lastly I am the only one in this group that has a lot of experience in all aspects of software engineering, and then there is my team.  Other leaders within us are not technical, or are but not in cloud software or architecture, but rather the other parts of our product offering that are outside the realm of cloud or software development.

Thanks.

[Ron Jeffries]

Jeff,

On Sep 25, 2017, at 3:08 PM, JM <je...@magentatech.com> wrote:

I'm looking for feedback and thoughts after you read this.  Am I out of line here, is the dev team correct, and what should my role be?  We work within a billion dollar company, but are some what disconnected as we are venturing into a new market.  Lastly I am the only one in this group that has a lot of experience in all aspects of software engineering, and then there is my team.  Other leaders within us are not technical, or are but not in cloud software or architecture, but rather the other parts of our product offering that are outside the realm of cloud or software development.

Just one challenging thought: if you were actually part of the team, in the room with them, they could get the benefit of your knowledge without it coming from outside the team … because you would be inside.

Ron Jeffries

ronjeffries.com

Wisdom begins when we learn the difference between "that makes no sense" and "I don't understand". -- Mary Doria Russell