Don't avoid responsibility

 To get the things done more efficiently, many companies tried scrum or agile approach to replace the "waterfall" way of software development.

In some companies, they mix multiple approaches but end up getting worse and less productive. Why is that? Because people are escaping their responsibility by selectively practice the roles assigned to the methodologies. Many of those only wants the power to raise a meeting and create empty tickets, but not analyze and reflect the changes in actual codes.

For example, PO (product owner), PjM, PdM, PC(project coordinator) and many other roles. In a Scrum method, a PO must be a real person, not a committee. This is important so that a product owner can precisely decide what the product should have in the stage, thus a scrum master can prioritize tickets and dependency based on the reflection of the output from members in this sprint.

In some companies, due to the rotten reputation of some PO, or they might be afraid of being criticized, reviewed or examined, they tend to hide the names of PO and claimed it's a collective committee that everything will be decided by several hidden discussions meeting among them. This is quite the contrary to the scrum spirit! 

Those people held the power to order, but no one knows who to report to, or who is responsible for a decision made by the "collective PO". How the decision is made? If it has been proven to be a bad idea in earlier sprint, then why wasting all the resource in the following ones?

A daily standup meeting that isn't based on actual tickets or resource allocation, can't be agile at all. People only said I will do x (a trivia)  but there's no connection to bigger goals, the team lead is afraid of taking responsibility to review the justification and fruit of completing x. 

The team lead is, burnt out as a phone operator for receiving all the calls from all level 24x7. He can't and he doesn't understand how to leverage the power of issue tracker and work asynchronously.

I will write a series of defect checking for the error cases of project management. It has a deep connection with the quality of my technical writing. Without raising good PjM and PdM, the rest of the team can't resist the temptation of being lazy and unproductive. 

It's a human nature that each will fight for their own benefits. But a good leader can always foster the consensus, and draws a clear line where everyone knows when to step in for their position and contribute for that timeline.