The Importance of Scrum Values

May 3, 2020 • 4 min to read

Learn about Scrum Values - a really important and underestimated topic. Discover why they matter & how they are related to Scrum.

Table of Contents

Introduction

To fully understand Scrum, knowledge about events, roles and artifacts is not enough. They are important, but the heart of the Scrum are Values: commitment, courage, focus, openness and respect.

The main reason why I would like to highlight the importance of the values in this post, is that they can be lost in a bunch of processes, methods or improvements. In the middle of the race to achieve success, we have a tendency to forget WHY we are doing it. What was the purpose of our actions? And that’s the moment when values can help us to evaluate if we are on the right track or not.

Commitment

When you are committed, you don’t do things because you must, but because you want to do them. In Scrum commitment can be demonstrated in multiple ways e.g. to people, Sprint Goal or own work.

What does it mean in daily activities? Taking responsibility for tasks that we committed to finish, being actively involved in all events. It means also asking questions, if there is something that we don’t understand or letting know about bugs and issues.

Why is commitment important in Scrum? Great high quality products are not created by people who “must”, they are developed by those who “want”!

Courage

This value is strictly related to Transparency (one of the 3 pillars of empiricism in Scrum). When it comes to telling the truth, especially when it is not a comfortable situation for us, we need a lot of courage.

Using it on a daily basis in Scrum means talking about problems, expressing opinion, even if it is different from others. You need to have the courage to tell about your mistakes or ask team members for help.

Without courage you cannot be transparent and without being transparent you are not able to adapt to changes, a crucial part of the product development.

Focus

In Scrum all events have a purpose and they are time-boxed (it means that they have a maximum duration time). It helps team members to be focused on their work and the Sprint Goal.

Scrum allows us to be focused on the most important elements: users’ needs (reflected in the Sprint Goal), work that needs to be done to fulfil them and collaboration with other team members in order to achieve it.

Focus also means no unnecessary distractions. Scrum Master should protect the Scrum Team from distractions and cause the removal of all impediments on their way.

Openness

This value is also part of the Transparency. It can mean sharing your ideas and knowledge with others. Openness is also related to being transparent about daily activities and challenges that appear during our work.

The important part of the Scrum is being open for changes and adapting to them. During inspection events like Retrospective, openness can help to find out what went well during the Sprint and what should be improved. That’s how the team can constantly improve their work and develop their skills.

Respect

Respect is definitely my favorite Scrum Value. Based on my observations, lack of respect is the reason for most of the communication and product delivery issues. Only by respecting people, we can collaborate with them and have our mind open to their ideas.

In the Scrum Team, it is really important to respect the way people think, work and their level of skills. Showing respect means not judging if someone makes mistakes, but helping to fix them. This value is also important in regards to all interactions with the clients/stakeholders. Respect helps in developing trustworthy relationships based on the mutual understanding.

Remember

The best and at the same time the most difficult thing related to values is that there are multiple ways of expressing and interpreting them. Every Scrum Team can have a little bit different vision of above values.

That’s why it is important to talk about them and be aware of their impact.

To summarize: human body cannot survive without a heart and Scrum doesn’t work at all without values.

Are you struggling with using Scrum values in practice? Register for consultation with me. I will help you to understand how you can use them on a daily basis with your Scrum Team.