Putting the focus on products

As noted in the earlier section Requiring executive sponsorship, Scrum's implementation eliminates the plan-driven approach of traditional project management practices because there are too many unknowns in terms of customer needs, priorities, risks, and potential impediments. In the next subsection, you will learn how empiricism is a better approach to managing work in a project-oriented environment that experiences random and uncontrolled events. However, before we get there, we need to understand that the focus of work must be product-specific. We also need to understand why this is the case.

A traditional organization creates hierarchical organizational structures to support business functions, such as sales, marketing, development, and so on. This decomposition continues below the functional departmental level, with teams established by their type of work or skills.

Under the traditional model, project managers follow pre-defined plans and schedules to control work that is complex, unique, and time-limited. Those programs and projects may draw resources from the functional departments on an as-needed basis, for the duration of the project or resource requirement. In this model, the projects operate as matrix organizations, and team members effectively have two managers – the project manager and their functional manager.

At first glance, the matrix organizational structures may look efficient because all skills are managed and mentored by domain-specific line managers. These domain resources are also theoretically available on an as-needed basis to any project team that needs them.

In reality, the matrix organization is very inefficient. Domain-specific training makes it more challenging to cross-train employees so that they support other skills and technology requirements. Also, the projects may find that there are organizational constraints that limit their access to resources that are deployed for other operational, production, or project needs.

Organizational needs for specific domain-oriented resources vary over time. This means there are times when there will be insufficient resources and other times when there will be too many resources available with a particular skill. Both situations negatively impact the organization. Necessary work cannot be done when the resources are the limiting factor, and, at other times, the domain-specific resources are sitting unproductively on the bench. Both situations represent costs and inefficiencies to the organization.

All this goes away under Scrum. Instead, the management focus of Scrum is always on products, not functional departments or projects. Instead of borrowing resources, the Product Owner has full access to the functional resources they require to design, develop, and deliver their products.

So, now that you understand the importance of aligning Scrum Teams around products, and not projects, let's take a closer look at how to form and operate Scrum Teams.