When transitioning to Scrum, you may notice that you'll be better able to manage your workload. When you think about it, this makes much more sense; the people who are actually doing the work are the people best placed to understand its progress and value.
When a team forecasts User Stories to be completed during Sprint Planning to create the Sprint Backlog, they're setting up an informal commitment with a Product Owner. Here, we're saying that we will complete this work on the provision that:
- The Sprint Backlog remains fixed; there are no sudden changes such as altering priorities or swapping out stories.
- We're given the time, freedom, and space to work.
If we're able to reduce interruptions coming into our Development Team as much as possible, it allows us to focus on what we need to do. Instead of asking a Development Team member to do something "urgently", an urgent task can be placed at the top of the Product Backlog, where it will be picked up in the next Sprint.
Giving a team this latitude within the Sprint boundary means that they will become better at self-management. In fact, they're much more likely to complete the work and achieve the Sprint Goal if they're allowed to determine how to best organize themselves.
Another factor to consider in the successful self-organization of a team is subtle control. For a Scrum team, decisions on what to build ultimately stop with the Product Owner, and these decisions are influenced rather than directed by the wider stakeholder group.