If you put mayonaise in your cake because you don’t have butter, you aren’t being pragmatic, you’re being disgusting. I don’t care how good your experience is with the mayonaise in other recipes. I don’t care about it’s quality. It just doesn’t work in cake. The same goes for putting project managers and software architects in Scrum teams.
The whole point of the self organizing team is that it is SELF ORGANIZING. You can’t self-organize AND have an authority telling you what to do. These things are mutually exclusive. It doesn’t matter if your organization has architects, or if you have good experience with project managers. I’m sure they are indeed wonderful, but they do not feature in the Scrum recipe. For good reasons.
[vimeo 52325469 480 270]
Video producer: Roots Conference Norway
It is a very interesting video.
Iterative and incremental software development approaches like Scrum are suitable for a large amount of software development projects. If you decide to commit to Scrum, you should use it for what is was created and not trying to change it back to your preferred or well-known process just to fit in current roles.
If you are part of development team in a Scrum project, I think you should develop. It’s development team, isn’t it? If you put a software architect in a Scrum team, he must be hands on (referring to “Architects Must Be Hands On”, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know).