One of the classical Scrum anecdotes is the one Ken Schwaber quotes in Agile Software Management with Scrum. In short in the story a pig refuses to open a restaurant serving ham and eggs with collaboration with a chicken. :) And the reason the pig gives is that chickens would be only involved once pigs would be truly committed to the business.
The power of the message is extraordinary. Never expect chickens to take on any responsibility nor commitments. Chickens will always be there to give you good advices, fertilize your brain with nice ideas for generalizing solutions and provide speculative answers. However at the end of the day you will find yourself alone with your responsibilities and commitments, especially if something went wrong.
It is each team member's responsibility to distinguish between pigs and chickens. If someone discovers chickens being responsible for something than it is a clear sign to reorganize. Fingers will always be pointing the pigs.
http://lizkeogh.com/2011/08/11/done-with-chickens-and-pigs/
ReplyDeletehttp://www.implementingscrum.com/2006/09/11/the-classic-story-of-the-pig-and-chicken/
ReplyDeleteNEWS: The chickens were also committed!
ReplyDeleteThe Pigs and Chickens metaphore is no longer officially supported by scrum.org...
Why was it removed? Ken and Jeff felt it was better to discuss accountability directly in the Scrum Guide, as opposed to through metaphor. Read more here: http://www.scrum.org/scrum-guide-updates#chickens
Say goodbye to pigs, say goodbye to chickens...
Eventually it turned out that chickens were also committed - they lost their lives together with pigs - it just took about 10 years to come to this point of understanding their situation ;)
Be careful of sticking with anything in rapidly travelling agile world of continues change!