Scrum and holidays
Hello everyone.
We know that if one or more of the devs, part of the Scrum Team, are on holiday, the sprint will slow down or in any case adapt to the so-called "workforce" available for that period. How do you manage when you Scrum Master or your PO goes on holiday? In logic, teams are self-organized, in practice, a team with a PO, an SM and a DEV necessarily depends on the simultaneous presence of everyone. If even one element is missing, the team stops. However, teams are generally made up of multiple DEVs but only one PO and one SM. How do you organize these periods of your absence? Does the team proceed anyway? Technically, shouldn't the absence of one of these two figures block the entire process?
It shouldn't block the entire process.
In the short term the Scrum Team can operate without the PO. They can leverage the Product Goal and ordered Product Backlog as their guide when developing Sprint Goals, and capture Stakeholder feedback at Sprint Review and adapt the Product Backlog as needed. If the PO absence is planned in advance, perhaps some additional refinements can help before they go. Someone from the Scrum Team could even take on the accountability in the short term to help with focus.
If the Scrum Master has been coaching the team in self-management, they should be able to take a vacation without impacting the team. Like mentioned above, someone from the Scrum Team can take on the accountability in the short term if needed, or SM service could be shared amongst team members.
How do you manage when you Scrum Master or your PO goes on holiday?
Management of the situation ought to begin before it arises. A high dependency on the Scrum Master would become evident Sprint by Sprint, and there should be multiple opportunities to coach the team to self-manage. These could be highlighted during each Sprint Retrospective, for example.
As Developers become increasingly self-managing, a Scrum Master can shift their stance to focus more on organizational impediments, and to become more of an organizational agile coach.
Bear in mind that a Product Owner can potentially delegate the doing of their work to others, so they can continue during any temporary absence, realigning with the PO upon his or her return. The critical thing to recognize is that the PO remains accountable for value. In Scrum, you are allowed to go on holiday, but your accountabilities cannot be delegated to others just because you are sunning yourself in the Bahamas.
If even one element is missing, the team stops.
If the team comes to a stop when a Scrum Master goes on vacation, perhaps the team has been working without one all along.
Remember that the Scrum Guide does not provide job titles. It provides responsibilities and accountabilities grouped in a logical manner. Those responsibilities and accountabilities can be done by anyone but they do need to be done. While the Scrum Guide says nothing about delegating by the Scrum Master, I see no logical reason why that can't occur for short durations.
A team should not be so dependent on a single individual that it can not function if the individual is absent. If that is the case, you don't really have a team. You have a star performer with a lot of supporting actors.
Product Owners should be able to take time away from work if they have been communicating with the rest of the Scrum Team. The Product Backlog should be ordered so that the items with the most information and most value are forefront. The Scrum Team should know who their stakeholders are because they interact with them in the Sprint Review if not more often. There shouldn't be a reason a Product Owner is so important that they can not be unavailable for a period of time. Especially if that absence is something planned in advance.
A good Scrum Master will strive to get a team to the point where they are not needed. All information about what the team does should be transparent and available to anyone in the organization. The rest of the team should be capable of handling the removal of impediments. The organization as a whole should understand how best to communicate with the Scrum Team. The organization should also understand how the Scrum Team works to deliver usable increments of value in each Sprint.
If in fact, your Product Owner and Scrum Master are so important to the daily success of the Scrum Team, then the team should consider that an impediment and work to resolve it.
Thank you all for the valuable answers.
I appreciate all your points of view and certainly I should have explained the situation better, but let's say it was more to understand the various opinions on the matter. Specifically, if we take these points for granted:
- the DEVs must work on their activities as much as possible and do not have the time/way/desire to take on the responsibility of keeping the board in order, talking to the SHs, carrying out all those practices that are the responsibility of SMs and POs.
- the PO can delegate various activities, especially to the SM.
- the SM is therefore in the condition that in its absence, a PO may not be able to replace it, the DEV would not be able to be completely autonomous.
Again, we're talking theory here: in practice, for short periods teams get ahead in some way, even if they don't necessarily go through all the ceremonies. I still don't do practically any ceremonies because they are seen as "wastes of time" but, hey, this is the job and maybe it's better to adapt to get the best out of it.