Interview and SINO
I have a job interview for a dual role of Business Analyst and Project Manager on Monday.
The job description was written by someone with minimal knowledge of Scrum - it was more like a keywords soup and the phone screen was mainly yes/no questions. When I used terms like use cases and UML, that confused the HR manager who was conducting the phone screen. Is this normal? My BA roles were always through networking before.
Secondly, it was revealed that the company is going to adopt the Scrum framework but with the project manager role, it seems to be more like Scrum In Name Only (SINO).
How do I raise this concern in the interview without coming across as a process nazi? It is obvious that they need someone with knowledge of Scrum but I don't think they'd get the full benefit by not hiring a product owner and scrum master as well.
Any advice would be highly appreciated.
Julie, you will not be able to change the culture of a company from the outside. Therefore, it is up to you whether you want to accept a position with a company that may be confused about Scrum and Agile.
A few questions that you may want to ask to give you some more insight:
1) Why is the company moving to Scrum/Agile? What benefits are they hoping to realize with the change?
2) With the shift to Scrum, what is actually changing within the company (roles, processes)?
3) What is the Agile/Scrum experience level within the organization? What training has been provided, if any?
Keep in mind, you may have some keen observations and definite concerns, but it is usually a soft approach to simply ask powerful questions like "why" and "how". You aren't being judgmental, and you are getting them to provide you with valuable information so that you can make an educated decision about whether this is a good place to work at or not.
Good luck.
Posted By Timothy Baffa on 02 Sep 2016 03:17 PM
Julie, you will not be able to change the culture of a company from the outside. Therefore, it is up to you whether you want to accept a position with a company that may be confused about Scrum and Agile.
A few questions that you may want to ask to give you some more insight:
1) Why is the company moving to Scrum/Agile? What benefits are they hoping to realize with the change?
2) With the shift to Scrum, what is actually changing within the company (roles, processes)?
3) What is the Agile/Scrum experience level within the organization? What training has been provided, if any?
Keep in mind, you may have some keen observations and definite concerns, but it is usually a soft approach to simply ask powerful questions like "why" and "how". You aren't being judgmental, and you are getting them to provide you with valuable information so that you can make an educated decision about whether this is a good place to work at or not.
Good luck.
Thank you, I really appreciate your reply. I had the interview yesterday and...it surely wasn't good.
Firstly, they said that the Prince2 PM, SM and BA will all be the same person. Their reasoning for the hybrid framework was that "there is a huge overlap between Prince2 and Scrum" and that "the company will die if we only use pure Scrum". Daily stand-ups are instead weekly, the product backlog doesn't exist, sprint planning is deemed "pointless" and the PM interferes with all of the development.
Also, I'm used to doing use cases in flowchart form, but their use case template is not very intuitive.
They ended up rejecting me because they said that they're looking for one person who can fulfill all 3 roles and that they apparently found that candidate.
They ended up rejecting me because they said that they're looking for one person who can fulfill all 3 roles and that they apparently found that candidate.
Julie, my initial reaction was that they found a candidate who basically said what they wanted to hear, and not what they needed to hear.
From your recap of the interview, they seem to be a company dying already, even if they don't see it yet. Hopefully you will find a good opportunity soon, and then can be very thankful that you did not work in such an unpleasant environment.
> They ended up rejecting me because they said that they're
> looking for one person who can fulfill all 3 roles and that they
> apparently found that candidate.
If the patient doesn't die, they'll be looking for professional help soon enough.