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Handle Arrogant Seniors who are new to agile environment

Last post 12:23 pm October 29, 2019 by Harshal Rathee
8 replies
05:08 pm October 26, 2019

Hello All,

  • I had appointed as scrum master for one the Dev teams who works on Artificial Intelligence and Data Science.
  • All the team members are experienced more then 12+ years , And 2 of the candidates are not at all following the

    agile rules and denying to attend the meetings.
  • I tried giving leadership to lead the team ,So that they can realize about their experiance and lead the team ,

    But they even denied accepting it.

Can any one please help me what steps should I take to make them follow scrum rules.


02:38 pm October 28, 2019

Have you talked with them about what might be driving their resistance to this particular change?

In addition, do you feel the leaders are bought into this new approach and understand how to help their direct reports through change at an individual level? 


05:02 pm October 28, 2019

Have you spoken to the team about this?   It seems some team members are willing to give Scrum a try, while others are resistant to it.   You should ingrain it into your practice as a Scrum Master to take any and all issues to the team for discussion.

Also, motivation plays a huge role in understanding behavior.   Forget about how disruptive or "arrogant" some of the team members appear to be.   Ask yourself what the goal might be for these individuals exhibiting such behavior?

And to add to Tony's comments, to what degree is Scrum being promoted/adopted?   Has the Development Team received Scrum or Agile training?


05:26 pm October 28, 2019

Hello Tony / Tim,

As mentioned above they are good in agile practices and they got training in agile scrum 5 years ago.

And all the team members are experienced persons ,So they don't follow agile rules and focus on deliverables


05:37 pm October 28, 2019

And all the team members are experienced persons ,So they don't follow agile rules and focus on deliverables

Is this effective?

What problems are being caused by their behaviour?


05:44 pm October 28, 2019

I'm not sure what 'agile rules' you're referring to but I'm curious...if they're not focused on delivering value of some sort then what is it they're focusing on that they feel is more important?

Without more context it's hard to determine the root cause of the resistance here. If you've been doing Scrum for 5 years this shouldn't be anything new to them... 

Some general strategies you or their leadership could try...

1) listen to understand their objections

2) focus on outcomes not 'how' they are to be doing certain things

3) provide clear consequences of not making the change and demonstrate them if needed

4) show the benefit in a way that is meaningful to them

 


09:22 pm October 28, 2019

Can any one please help me what steps should I take to make them follow scrum rules.

Have you identified the likely consequences of the behavior you describe and who in the organization will care about them?


12:19 pm October 29, 2019

As mentioned above they are good in agile practices and they got training in agile scrum 5 years ago.

And all the team members are experienced persons ,So they don't follow agile rules and focus on deliverables

Their focus seems to be right as per me. Is the team reaching their agreed Goal and producing increments each sprints ? What rules you are referring here ? Do you mean how they should produce the increments ?


12:23 pm October 29, 2019

Just to be clear by focus i mean - Focus on producing deliverables and generating value at the end. 


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