Do Agile Methods - Scrum - Motivate your Team?

Well my current experience is that the answer is a sounding YES. 

Developers love to develop software using Scrum. The motivation and positive energy just explodes. People talk together, build as a team better products and enjoy the daily activities.

Stakeholders and in particular customers or users embraces the advantages they get.

Still a whisper can be heard that yes is not without consequences for the organization. 

Say your team is developing with Scrum. We have the following roles:

• the stakeholders
• the developers (Team)
• the Scrum master (SM)
• the product owner (PO)

Stakeholders

Stakeholders love Scrum. Every two weeks they have a new application version they can use, test, and get feedback from all users. This is the dream of every key account manager.

Because a new release is available every two weeks the stakeholders should also provide feedback every two weeks. Therefore they sometimes hate the pressure of agile and Scrum. 

Developers Team

Agile methods - Scrum, XP - are fun for all developers. But suddenly everyone can see your code, so at the beginning you as a developer must cope with different views how good code should be written. Suddenly you must master Test Driven Development TDD, mocking, unit test, legible documents. But once you have it, you start to experience the "flow" and enjoy the atmosphere and to deliver at the end of each sprint a new software.

But later you realize that Scrum says the team is responsible. You must acknowledge that the product success is also your success. Each design decision is now also driven by ROI considerations. If you master these responsibilities you suddenly discover the world of engineering, creating great products with an optimal balance of external quality and costs without ever jeopardizing the quality of the core. But you can never again deny that you as developer are in charge.

Scrum Master

Scrum master is cool with a team enjoying Scrum and the flow of success. You just have to realize you are not a master but the enabler of a team of talented engineer. 

So you need to discover your "the lonely cowboy riding in the sun" song why this job is so rewarding.

Product Owner

As a product owner you control the budget of the project, the priorities and at the end of each iteration you can change all priorities and goals.
Cool isn't it. But wait as a product owner I am responsible of the budget and product success and each time a member of the team asks me something I must have an answer ready.

Scrum is cool and we enjoy it. But Scrum makes everything transparent and fast. Every two weeks a new version is delivered. This version must be evaluated, accepted or a list of improvements must be provided in the next days. This rhythm is fast, really fast. Once you are up to this speed you will enjoy the flow.

Cautious Words

Middle management often struggles with the agile approach at the beginning. See for example the discussion about manager role in an agile environment in the LeSS approach. But the results are worth the effort.

Reading experience report or digging in the findings of Kotter you realize success or failure goes through how you handle middle management.