Scrum and managers

I can't speak about ITIL, but in Scrum the Development Team is self organizing and self managing.  Empowerment is given the to Development Team.  No one tells the Development Team how to turn the Product Backlog into a working Increment, not even the Scrum Master.  The Development Team decides how much work they can take on in a Sprint to meet the Sprint Goal.

The Product Owner decides what the Development Team will work on, ensuring he or she maximizes value.

Managers do have their place.  They can coach, remove organizational impediments which the Development Team or Scrum Master cannot remove, and support the team in other way as servant leaders.  There is no place for command and control.

It's all in the Scrum Guide.

Thanks Chris.

So the Developers decide themselves how much work they can take on per sprint.

The Product Owner decides what overall work to give to the Developers.

Who gives the Product Owner the requirements?

Who gives the Product Owner the requirements?

Hi, Jason! Nobody is giving requirements to Product Owner. Product Owner is "CEO" of product and only he/she decides what is required to add to Product Backlog (requirements). He/She is responsible for the product.

Of course, this can happen by influence from different stakeholders and here we may find definition of this case in Scrum Guide:

"The Product Owner is one person, not a committee. The Product Owner may represent the desires of a committee in the Product Backlog, but those wanting to change a Product Backlog item’s priority must address the Product Owner.

For the Product Owner to succeed, the entire organization must respect his or her decisions. The Product Owner’s decisions are visible in the content and ordering of the Product Backlog. "

Thanks!

So this is indeed very different from ITIL. In ITIL, there is a the concept of Product Owner (as above), but also Service Manager, Service Portfolio Manager, Business Relationship Manager and so forth. Whilst the idea may be sound (people are getting actual requirements from the business), often what happens is very slow delivery and bureaucracy since many people need to agree on the strategy.

Sounds like the Product Owner in Agile actually 'owns' the Product, which is great.

I'm not that familiar with ITIL, but I'm familiar with other standards that, on the surface, appear to be similar.

Is there anything that is preventing one individual from having multiple roles? Is there any reason why the person who has the role of Product Owner (in the Scrum Framework) doesn't have the ITIL roles of Service Portfolio Manager, Business Relationship Manager, and so on?

Alternatively, the Scrum Guide says that the Product Owner may represent a committee. If you have a Scrum Product Owner for every product, that may closely match to one ITIL role. If ITIL roles extend across a product, the individual in the organization with a given ITIL role may be on that committee that is represented to the Scrum Team (or multiple Scrum Teams) by the Product Owner.

I think if you focus on the intention of ITIL and the intention of Scrum, you'll likely find lots of alignment, although there may not be a 1:1 mapping between concepts or roles. I've been successful in mapping agile methods to organizations that were measured against ISO9001 and CMMI with few issues.

The risk of a Scrum PO also acting in other roles is that some of them may be contradictory to Scrum ideas, for example PO should not be trying to force the development team to work faster, but if he is also some kind of deadline-bound project leader, he may feel the need to do so.