Personnel management in Scrum teams

Just my opinion, but I would strongly suggest not placing the Scrum Master in any position of authority over the team, as this can distort the servant-relationship the SM has with the development team.

Likewise, I would caution against identifying Team Leads with management authority over the rest of the development team.   The Scrum Guide is fairly explicit about this:

Scrum recognizes no titles for Development Team members other than Developer, regardless of the work being performed by the person; there are no exceptions to this rule

The Development Team must grow towards self-management and team ownership of all sprint work.   Identifying individual responsibilities within the Development Team prevents this from taking place.

Your questions regarding people management within a Scrum environment is not new.   What is important is to understand the "why" behind these practices, and then to identify options for meeting such needs that do not violate Agile or Scrum.

Good luck.

Tough issue.

Definitely not the Scrum Master to perform theses tasks.

The Scrum Master, as an organizational coach, has a duty to explain to management which behaviors are helpful and which are not helpful. Positioning management as "beyond Scrum" instead of facilitating Scrum Team delivery is unlikely to be helpful. 

Hi Vasilij,

Who is expected to be responsible for holding annual performance reviews, approve vacations, help tailor career and so on for team members of a scrum team? Can scrum master be responsible for this?

I agree with others that Scrum Master should not be responsible for performance review, approve vacations, and help tailor career...etc.  My reasons are

• (1) once the scrum master has the authority, it seems to make the role more like a Project Manager who manages team performance, resource availability, etc.  
• (2) and once there is someone conduct performance review and approve vacations, it seems to shift the team's focus from hold each other accountable to "listening to the boss"

Our current organisation is considering adding team leads to scrum teams to have this responsibility, but it does not sound like a good agile idea to me. Any help will be appreciated.

(Below are my thoughts beyond Scrum/Nexus discussion)

I am guessing one of the reasons the organization is considering placing a team lead is to have someone "managing" the team.  In other words, it is easier for the organization to hold one person accountable, usually, this is the Line Manager or PM.

This is a really tough one... and I think this involves the company organization structure and HR policy.  Below are my research and thoughts about your question. I hope it helps to shed some light in your research.

• Evidence-Based Management Guide seems to suggest organizations focus on three KVAs. I think this may be helpful to use to evaluate Scrum Teams' performance
  
  https://s3.amazonaws.com/scrumorg-website-prod/drupal/2016-09/EBMgt_Gui…
  
  http://blog.accentient.com/files/Schwaber-Reston.pdf
  
   
• To continue on this idea, if the KVA and KVM(Measures) can be visible to the team. Together with 360-degree feedback, maybe there is a way to encourage the team to hold themselves accountable and get their self-organized "performance evaluation" of themselves. 

To sum up the discussion so far. SM should not be doing this work and I agree with this. Yet I have not heard any statement, who should be doing the work of approving vacations, managing career development and other personnel management tasks.

What benefit does the organisation have by having someone approve vacations? What's the goal of this requirement? The answer to that should lead you to who (if anybody) should make that decision.

Good question. Still no answer. So I give my opinion based on my current experience and would of course like to hear other opinions as well:

While "Scrum recognizes no titles for Development Team members other than Developer", most companies I know do. And therefore, they have two different views on their employees: the scrum view and the organisational view. While the scrum view does not know any other title than developer in a development team. the organisational view still defines a head of team / lead developer.

This person has to be chosen wisely, he or she has to very well distinguish between the scrum role and organisational role. Most of the time (like 99%) this person has to be in its scrum role when interacting with the rest of the team and just be part of the development team like everybody else. Only at very few occasions like discussing salaries, career development this persons will switch to the line-management role. Thats absolutely not easy to achieve and will never be perfect, as in the end: People tend to behave differently when they have some kind of supervision with them.



But in the end: Holacracy is not for every company - But maybe for scrum teams, this would be the way to go.

Actually, assigning a managerial role to any one of the Scrum team members is definitely an anti-pattern. That likely inhibits transparency and trust. Therefore, you should take people management role out of scrum team. Some companies have people managers for that reason.

A people manager's duty would be taking feedback about individuals from other Scrum members and getting other company based performance KPIs from various data resources and creating an individual performance score. There are many ways to collect these information. But performance evaluation outcome should mostly be shaped by scrum team feedback.