Scrum Values Take 1st Place
/
They're back! By popular demand, receiving 3 times more votes than it's nearest competitor, Scrum Values now take a prominent place in the latest update to The Scrum Guide™ (July 2016). Including the values in the Scrum Guide, in the words of Ken Schwaber, "puts the heart back into it."
The five Scrum values first made their appearance in the 2001 book, Agile Software Development with Scrum by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle, but somehow missed the cut in the 2010 and 2013 versions of The Scrum Guide™. While they may have seemed to have gone missing, the Scrum values have been with us all along, niggling little reminders that practices are just practices and that if you don't actually get the Agile mindset, you don't actually get Agile.
To jog our collective memories, the five Scrum values are:
Commitment - "doing our best"
Focus - "make it happen"
Openness - "know what is going on"
Respect - "as you are... for what you bring to the table"
Courage - "ability to take risk"†
In the 6 July 2106 webinar announcing the update to The Scrum Guide™, Ken Schwaber stated, "Scrum values are the lifeblood of Scrum." When asked why a focus on values is the significant revision to The Scrum Guide™, both Ken and Jeff Sutherland responded that the main challenge that they've seen with organizations realizing success using Scrum is a disconnect with the underlying values. "We see places where it doesn't work well, we find these values missing, or the values not really being followed completely... If your want the benefits, you adhere to the values... you embrace the values."††
“We see places where it doesn’t work well, we find these values missing, or the values not really being followed completely... If your want the benefits, you adhere to the values... you embrace the values.”
So, these things are important.
Ten years ago I participated in a Scrum Gathering open space session in which the Scrum Values were the main point of discussion. I and the other Certified Scrum Trainers who convened the session were concerned that the values were not being given sufficient emphasis. Each of us had seen the struggles organizations had with implementing Scrum. Many of these struggles resulted in the abandonment of Scrum. We suspected that the root cause was a fundamental misunderstanding of Scrum as a set of practices rather than a set of values underpinning a framework. We believed that without the values there is no heart, no life to the practices. Each of us vowed to make the values a key point in our trainings and coaching.
Scrum Values session at 2006 Scrum Gathering in Minneapolis. From left to right: Jim York, Geoff Watts, Bob Schatz, Tamara (Sulaiman) Runyon, Michele Sliger, Gabrielle Benefield, Chris Sterling, Bill Wake
Living the values is not easy. But now that they part of the official definition of Scrum, they are part of the conversation. I am eager to see the difference that makes ten years from now.
† Select quotes from the 6 July 2016 Webinar, Scrum Guide Refresh
†† ibid. Ken Schwaber
