====== What Do We Do If We Don’t Have Budget for Product Owners and Scrum Masters? - SSA ======

Or “Doesn’t having a full-time SM or PO result in a significant reduction in capacity?”
Or “What happens if we are unable to assign a PO or SM to each team?”
Or “What do we do if no one wants to be the Scrum Master or Product Owner?”

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====== Context ======

Large organizations embark on an agile transformation to improve how they deliver value to customers. This is all good. However when we get into the nitty-gritty of an implementation, there are a number of concepts and ideas that just seem counter-intuitive which results in the thinking that some of these ideas will just have to be adapted to “our situation.” 

One of those ideas is the idea that we have specialized roles. For example, at the team level we have the role of the Product Owner (PO) and the role of the Scrum Master (SM). “Common sense”, your intuition tells you “says that if I have a someone to take on the role of a full time Scrum Master and another the role of a full time Product Owner then I will have lost the capacity of two people per team, or we need to find budget for all these additional people.” And there are a lot of teams being formed, aren’t there?

This, coupled with a limited understanding of why we have these roles (“a Scrum Master is just an administrator, right?”) results in a reluctance to properly establish these roles in the organization. For example, organizations will opt to:

  * Double and treble up the teams that Product Owners or Scrum Masters supports
  * Add the responsibilities of Product Owner and Scrum Master to the existing roles (already busy) people already have (e.g. “QA person; you are now the Scrum Master!”)
  * Combine the roles (e.g. “you are now the Product Owner and the Scrum Master”)
  * Combinations these approaches

Don’t get me wrong. These approaches might be required to get started; we need to be pragmatic. But we need to be aware of the tradeoffs we make when we do something that is less that ideal. Our mindset needs to be that we feel bad about making these tradeoffs, rather than thinking we have made good decisions. And, by way of observation, after doing a lot of agile transformations

> Large organizations seem to struggle more in identifying full-time Product Owners and Scrum Masters than small organizations despite the presumably even more limited availability of people in smaller organizations.


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====== Want to Know More? ======

  * [[what_is_the_role_of_the_product_owner_ssa|What is the Role of a Product Owner?]]
  * [[what_is_the_role_of_the_scrum_master_ssa|What is the Role of a Scrum Master?]]
  * [[what_should_we_consider_when_forming_a_new_team|What Should We Consider When Forming a New Team?]]

{{tag>FAQ SubjectSpecificArticle Roles ScrumMaster ProductOwner Structure FirstSprint}}