Pick Up Your Clothes

With a four year old and a six year old familiar sayings around our house are "pick up your toys", "pick up your clothes", "brush your teeth", "get dressed". Of course we could get our short-term objectives met much faster if we did these tasks but we don't. We understand the importance of our children developing their own awareness of basic hygiene, cleanliness and developing their own skills that will one day help them become independent.

Giora Morein tells us that ScrumMasters's should track hours remaining on a sprint

Time-tracking is a nuisance and a distraction for these motivated folks. To the ScrumMaster and the team, however, it is extremely important.

While I don't question Giora's good intentions and there is no doubt this approach is expeditious I believe it is worth striving to have the team updating their own hours remaining.

There are many many benefits to being a member of a self-organizing, self-managing team but with those benefits also comes responsibility and accountability. Here are some dangers I see in team's not updating their hours remaining:

• They become less accountable for the number they provide
  
• They don't understand the mechanisms of the self-managing, self-organizing team
• They become dependent on the Scrum Master
• The Scrum Master becomes frustrated and disillusioned
• The Scrum Masters morphs from a leadership role to a management role
  
• The team starts to revert to form