Specific roles in scrum, not overburden working Scrum Masters and Product Owners wanting a person to have both roles, that is not agile

They always say that agile teams should be self-managed and multidisciplinary. What does that mean? Means they have to have sufficient management capacity to perform the necessary functions to achieve the sprint or iteration properly, and if they have to work in several areas or skills need that ability to adapt.

This often from corporate managements backfires, company and team. How? We trying to take several roles at once by the same person, are more productive, reduce costs (1 person = 2 roles = 2 persons). Multidisciplinary teams is that they are ... And then the problem arises.

The Scrum Master is also developer team development 50%, 50% Scrum Master, the Scrum Master and Product Owner are the same person. We are multidisciplinary teams! ..¡BAD! Many times people are presented as Product Manager and Scrum Master, Project Manager and Scrum Master. It's OK to have both knowledge will facilitate their work, but for the sake of equipment, both roles at once, Product Owner and Scrum Master is not exercised.

Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, parents and inventors of Scrum, as I said in the 90s and continue to say in the XXI century that are specific roles, why? For productivity. A person is much more productive if no context switches and is dedicated to a function.

The Product Owner often comes from being Project Manager, Project Manager, etc. With experience and total control of the project, people and process. A good project manager, you can convert into Product Owner Scrum Master or if you have extensive knowledge of the methodology, or does the product or process to reach the product, but not both, the Scrum Master will ensure that engages to do their duties, but never both roles at once, that is endemic in the past, non-agile project, the absolute CONTROL project. If the agile says revolve around self-managed and multidisciplinary teams, let it be true.

The Product Owner is responsible for product that succeed, prioritize, delete and create backlog items that add value to the final product, to meet with the team, so that it understands that it must perform and what it should focus its efforts, meet with clients who have vision or contribute ideas to the product and show the progress. Quite work is that now, do not overburden more.

The Scrum Master is a servant leader, you should know the Agile and Scrum in particular, and sees that the team adopt these guidelines and removes the impediments that may arise within the team. It can, for small teams, if the computer has knowledge of Scrum, sharing the role of team member (exercising functions of product development) and Scrum Master, but if you do not have knowledge of agile methodologies in the team or if the team having 4 or more members, the Scrum Master should be 100% helpful leader Scrum process. The Scrum Master may conflict if engaged team, since it will have to choose between doing chores Sprint or eliminate obstacles that appear during her Sprint (including its own obstacle of not being as productive by sharing roles and responsibilities) . Quite work is that now, do not overburden more.

  Why? For productivity, avoid changing contexts and improve the team, it will become 100% agile, and more importantly, the Scrum Master may engage in acquiring knowledge, techniques inspect and test the equipment, new methods that make it more productive more agile team. The Scrum Master works with customers and management to identify and appoint the Product Owner if necessary, explain to the Product Owner how to do his job, and manage, and optimize the value of the product, try to get the best out of the team making it agile and removes all impediments arising on the computer.

The great gurus agilismo, Jeff Sutherland, Ken Schwaber, Mike Beadle, Martine Devos, Mike Cohn say something very important, is traversed a path to be agile, but is agile or 100% or not agile. We deceive ourselves by saying we are nimble than 70%, or we are agile, we do iterations, dailys, but we do retrospectives. We will be agile when we see productive teams committed, evolved over time and look forward to improving every day at work, 100% agile when even the Scrum Master, costing work getting improvements in the team because this team touches the agile excellence. That's being agile.