Ken Schwaber explained the changes to Scrum in a Keynote at the Scrum Day in Germany. One major change is the renaming of the Sprint Commitment to Sprint Forecast. Ken said that some Product Owners were yelling to the team that had just missed to Sprint Commitment. I understand that this yelling is not something you want to have when you introduce Scrum. Scrum and agile methods in general rely on highly motivated teams. Choleric Product Owners wont help you. But is the reason for this behaviour the much more binding term „Commitment“?
If a team fails to meet the commitment, then this may be an indicator for two things:
- change in the environment of the team is needed
- the problems the team has to solve are to complex.
In both of these two circumstances the team or the organisation should learn and improve. The team can learn how to better cope with the complexity of the given problems and the organisation can learn how to transform to support the teams better to get things to done. IMO: Renaming the Sprint Commitment to Sprint Forecast will take away the urgency of the necessity to learn.
We find commitment in many cultures. The Germans for instance are well known for their punctuality. Everybody commits to be at a certain place on time. It reduces the time to wait and people can start working immediately. Every German who has worked in another country realizes how this behaviour helps to get things done and avoids wasting time. Commitments help us to better work together.
In the organisation we have commitments on various level. Shareholder, investors and owners give their capital and want commitment from the board that the investment will have a return. Customers pay for the products and services and want commitment from the vendor to keep the promises. Employees want a commitment that they get a monthly salary. There are commitments everywhere on the boundaries of the organisation. Inside the organisation we have managers who commit to certain goals, e.g. increase revenue, create innovative products or reduce costs.
Is a commitment by a team to deliver some value after two weeks not possible within a learning organisation?