How To Align The Scrum Values With Your Organizational Culture
Applying Scrum values and principles.
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Many new Scrum teams face significant friction from others in their own organization. Leaders or other teams don’t understand how they’re operating or why they’re doing things the same as before. This confusion leads new Scrum Masters to ask the following question.
How do you align the scrum values with your organizational culture?
Culture structures what we value and how we behave. It’s critical to align the organizational values and the values driving how you plan to get work done.
This article will cover three essential topics to help you begin this journey of navigating organizational culture and Scrum.
- What are Scrum’s values?
- How do values shape culture?
- How to evaluate your organization’s culture?
What are Scrum’s values?
It can feel different to work on a Scrum team. The values and pillars of Scrum is built upon have a significant influence.
Scrum.org recognizes five values critical to the practice of Scrum: commitment, courage, focus, openness, and respect.
- Commit to achieving the goals of the Scrum Team.
- Courage to do the right thing and work on challenging problems.
- Focus on the Sprint's work and the Scrum Team's goals.
- Open about all the work and the challenges with performing the work.
- Respect each other to be capable, independent people.
Scrum also depends on three pillars transparency, inspection, and adaptation. I’ve been highlighting these three pillars throughout the series to help you see how they shape the practice of Scrum.
These values and pillars are lived out in the roles, events, and artifacts of Scrum. Some examples include:
- The backlog is transparent to the team and the organization, creating clarity and openness about both focus and priority.
- The sprint retro creates space to inspect and adapt, inviting team members to be courageous.
- The daily standup requires openness and transparency but provides focus and commitment.
As you walk through the What is Scrum series, you’ll see the values of commitment, courage, focus, openness, and respect. These values are expected and cultivated as the teams share in refining, sizing, selecting, and completing the work.
How do values shape culture?
When training new teams in Scrum, some have commented, “it kind of treats you like an adult.” I would agree with this sentiment and emphasize that it can be highly refreshing.
But it can also be challenging. Transparency often feels scary at first. So does releasing control. There’s a lot of trusting in Scrum.
The team members must trust each other to be transparent and open as well as respect that each other will follow through on what they committed to. Leadership has to trust the scrum team with a level of empowerment and less control than is often common in many organizations. The team also has to trust the leadership that they genuinely have the freedoms they are being promised.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
- Peter Drucker
Running Scrum will impact the culture of your team and organization. While it may create some friction, it will likely have a positive impact. Those two are not mutually exclusive, and in fact, they may be symbiotic.
It will probably force honest and difficult conversations with team members and leaders. Leading out and up with transparency can feel dangerous and exposed. But these changes will also likely breathe life into many people and teams.
An agile culture
I hear organizations talk a lot about wanting to have an agile culture. They often want to be more flexible, but agility involves more than just flexibility.
Think about when you describe an athlete as being agile. Usually, you observe the ability to change direction combined with power, speed and balance that seems to defy gravity.
There’s a lot of trusting in Scrum.
Scrum can help an organization cultivate an organizational culture with those same attributes.
- Power. When a team has clarity about what they are accomplishing and the freedom to adjust and own how to get there, they are a powerful team that can take on significant challenges.
- Speed. Sprints provide a clear cadence allowing the team to focus and move ahead quickly.
- Balance. The roles of the Product Owner and Scrum Master balance each other, holding the team’s output and the team's health in tension.
- Change direction. Most Scrum events intentionally create space for evaluation and adjustment, allowing the team to confidently shift, even daily.
An agile culture doesn’t happen overnight, and it takes time to practice together how these values are lived out on your team or in your organization.
Related Guides
How to evaluate your organization's culture?
The degree to which the Scrum values and pillars match your organization will give you a good feel for how it will be received and experienced. Evaluating your organization's culture will help you see what barriers and opportunities there will be when you implement Scrum.
Here are some questions to use as you begin evaluating your organization:
- Is it normal for plans, priorities or results to be publicly shared within the organization?
- Is it more common for teams to work toward consensus or for the leader to dictate the solution?
- Do employees focus on specific tasks during a day/week or bounce from priority to priority?
- Do definitive outcomes or clever ideas typically drive planning times?
- When something is delegated, is the person indeed given the necessary agency and autonomy to reach the desired goal?
- Are people held accountable for delivering results?
- How is feedback to change received?
- If someone is struggling with something, how does leadership respond? Do they come around them for support or take back control?
As you work through these questions, consider how your organization aligns with the values and pillars of Scrum. When determining the next steps, I find it most helpful to focus on the three pillars of Scrum.
- Transparency to make things more visible.
- Inspection to create space for evaluation.
- Adaptation to encourage growth.
Are there leaders in your organization who also value these? If so, connect with them to socialize the idea of Scrum. You want them to understand both the what and why of implementing Scrum.
Ask their advice on how to implement it specifically in your organization. Not only will you glean helpful insight, but you will have an advocate when others start asking questions about what you’re doing.
Leaning Scrum for the first time can be a bit overwhelming. There are many new terms and concepts in Scrum.
Well we’re here to help.
Related Guides
Action Plan
Culture can be hard to perceive at first and difficult to change. Evaluating how Scrum values align with your current culture will help you navigate the journey of implementing Scrum in your organization.
I hope this article helped you envision how to live the Scrum values on your team or organization. If you want to learn more about Scrum in general, check out my What is Scrum? A Guide for Everyday People to Learn Scrum. If you have more questions, please feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.
Still not sure about your next step with Scrum? I offer a couple of free coaching sessions each month. You can signup for a free 30-minute coaching session, and we can work together to identify a good next step for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Scrum design
What are the three pillars of Scrum?
Scrum is founded on three essential pillars, and each leads the team to ask a critical question.
- Transparency. How does this make things more visible?
- Inspection. Where does this create space to evaluate?
- Adaptation. When does this encourage growth?
Learn how to apply the three pillars of Scrum and then explore the most common terms in a Scrum glossary.
What are the values of Scrum?
There are five values critical to the practice of Scrum: commitment, courage, focus, openness, and respect.
- Commit to achieving the goals of the Scrum Team.
- Courage to do the right thing and work on challenging problems.
- Focus on the Sprint's work and the Scrum Team's goals.
- Open about all the work and the challenges with performing the work.
- Respect each other to be capable, independent people
Learn how to align Scrum values with your organization and then explore the most common terms in a Scrum glossary.
What is the sprint goal in scrum?
The sprint goal encapsulates the product owner’s vision into a concrete statement for the development team to measure the sprint against. The sprint goal provides a theme for the sprint’s work helping the team see how all the parts come together.
Learn more about the role of the sprint goal in scrum and explore the essential Scrum glossary.
What is Scrum?
What is the definition of scrum?
Scrum is founded on three essential pillars leading teams to ask the following questions:
- How does this make things more visible? (Transparency)
- Where does this create space to evaluate? (Inspection)
- When does this encourage growth? (Adaptation)
Further explore the definition of scrum. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
Is Scrum hard to learn?
This is because Scrum’s simplicity makes learning easy, but Scrum truly changes how you work, and that adjustment can be difficult. It changes power dynamics and expectations within the team and between the team and the rest of the organization.
You can explore further is Scrum hard to learn, along with the pros and cons of Scrum. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
When did Scrum start?
Scrum was initially used as a term related to project management in 1986 by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in their paper “New New Product Development Game” In the Harvard Business Review. The first recorded Scrum project came a little later in 1993 from Jeff Sutherland.
You can learn more about Scrum’s backstory. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
What do all the scrum words mean?
Learning Scrum for the first time can be overwhelming. There are a lot of new terms and concepts in Scrum. I’ve listed the most common terms in a Scrum glossary.
Scrum elements
What is the definition of done?
The definition of done is a list of what must be true to consider a PBI done. The whole team creates and agrees to what is in the definition of done and is updated as needed for the team to function effectively.
Learn to use the definition of done and explore acceptance criteria vs definition of done.
What is the increment in scrum?
It is the next complete piece added to build the product. The increment is complete in the sense that it should be ready to release to the end-user even if the team chooses to wait.
Learn more about incremental and iterative development or explore the essential Scrum glossary.
How to use Scrum
Why use Scrum?
It forces clarity and prioritization, which provides the focus necessary for teams to be effective. Scrum embraces complexity and change by keeping many things simple and iteratively evaluating and adapting.
You can learn more about why to use Scrum and three challenges Scrum solves. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
When does Scrum not work well?
Scrum isn’t always the best option for teams. Scrum can fail when there is a substantial mismatch between organizational culture and the Scrum values. It also depends on the nature of the work you do. If you work if very linear, predictable and tightly defined, you may not experience many benefits Scrum provides.
Find out more about aligning your organizational values with Scrum or how Scrum might fit in your context. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
How do I know when to use Scrum?
Scrum functions at its best when you have a dedicated team focused on developing a singular product. Its agility shines when there are time constraints combined with uncertainty.
Explore the pros and cons of Scrum along with expectations vs. realities with Scrum. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
