YDS: HELP! My Manager Suspects the Scrum Team is Sandbagging!

HELP! My Manager Suspects the Scrum Team is Sandbagging! Let's explore the options this situation presents. All of this and more are discussed in today's episode of Your Daily Scrum with Todd Miller and Ryan Ripley.

Professional Scrum Trainers Todd Miller and Ryan Ripley built this course to help those interested in Scrum get up and running quickly using the Framework. They've partnered with Daria Bagina from ScrumMastered to bring practical materials and guides to the course.

Todd and Ryan also co-authored a book - Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems.

For more information about Agile for Humans, visit:

For more information about Daria and ScrumMastered:

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#HowToBecomeAScrumMaster #ScrumMasterCertification #AgileForHumans #FreeScrumMasterCourse #FreeScrumTraining

[pbrpb]

Hello to THE Todd Miller :) My team has only over delivered - thats actually as bad as under delivering. Doing free for the customer. Wonderful wonderful episode. May be situational leadership should help with underperformers.

[tomaszniemiec]

Excellent topic - trust in general is I would say the biggest challenge in organizations. I mean for real. For every problem and obstacle we have, there were probably three books written on how to solve it that we can look at, but the trust part is rough. There are ways to work with it in steps and in short I would say that: trust issues comes from lack of knowledge. I would start by getting to know from where this claim comes from? How does the manager understand sandbagging? What is the transparency of the team's workflow and way of working? Those areas would be the focus to start with.

[MrAkkim]

Thank you both for yet another great edition of YDS. S/O to both of you, as it relates to me starting my reading journey on FYS. Awesome book that was authored with measured detail and valuable insight. Highly recommend.

[kensaiyeahyeah]

There's sooo much to being a leader. I felt that the PAL-E course just scratched the surface. Maybe there is need for a PAL-A(dvanced)?

[MyParaGuide]

😂Well done, Todd! I finally subscribed 👋😁. Am I the 10000st 🤔? Just kidding 😊! Nice video as always!

[marymiller]

lol. I loved Todd's way of encouraging people to subscribe. That was funny!

I haven't seen sandbagging either. I have heard of crazy things happening in which case I was wondering if the leader was paying attention. That was more a function of a project manager not holding his team to account and higher ups not holding the project manager to account. The project was using Waterfall at the time. I have heard of situations where managers hid problems from sponsors until the problem became too big to ignore.  

Some of that would have been helped by taking the project from a Waterfall project management scenario to using Kanban. Kanban (using flow metrics) would have increased transparency. And, then some of that would have been impacting the culture. In thinking about it, vision and organizational strategic objectives were really missing. From there, leaders being held to account and leaders holding project managers to account (from the perspective of developing and growing people) would make a difference. Although technical leaders are not always trained in people skills that is also another opportunity for development. I once asked someone how much training there was in people skills for an organization's leadership programs. The answer was 0. I almost fell out of my chair.

[chihotdog]

Hey, another great topic, adding to the excellent knowledge already shared, I would also try and tap into the emotion this manager feels as anger can have many different sources. Once you get to that, then you can ask the manager what can be done to change that situation for the manager. It is not until you know the real WHY this manager reacts in that way can you help. Maybe they want to be part of the DS and has not been allowed, perhaps they want to take part in the retrospective and has not been asked, maybe they feel they do not have enough input into the direction of the product. Sandbagging, for me means there is a lack of inclusion and that manifests itself in anger.

[opmdevil]

Sandbagging! I've seen it! So, when I was still a dev, we were puzzled why something really took so long from one of the team members. We were kinda in the semi-scrum mode, so not that much transparency. When I checked the version control, there was 5 months periods with 2 2 month periods with no commit and one month in the middle where changes were just moving white spaces around. Literally nothing was done by that dev. He had the skills to do it if he was pushed hard enough but he just didn't. The problem was that dev but also the rest of the team because we turned the blind eye because the guy was generally a "nice guy but hard to work with and had connections". At first, managers didn't even believe the fact even with screen shots from the repository.

Sandbagging happens - it is a thing. The fact that you are a scrum master and you are supposed to be optimistic and talk about ivory towers, you still have to be able to have an objective stance on everything. Something all those bad things happen that the managers suspect.

[googleaccount]

One struggle teams have is the competition of working at a steady pace vs meeting sprint commitments. If there is an emphasis on meeting commitments the team has an incentive to sandbag and take less. If the focus is to work at a steady pace the team has an incentive to take more than they can commit to. Am I misunderstanding something?

[agilekyle]

Great video! Question - how do you approach a hands off PO who doesn’t want to own the backlog, or even contribute to it? We’re working with one that wants anyone else to come up with ideas so they can approve or deny it.

[MrLittleW]

Can't agree with this enough. Generally, developers really care about doing a good job. Devs generally start a new company with high passion. Morale is important to keep up because if morale starts declining, developers tend to care less, and if you care less, why would you work as hard?