Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect and Courage. Without them Scrum is a set of meetings — and the Scrum Guide says so almost that plainly.
Scrum is a small framework: three accountabilities, five events, three artefacts. You
can implement all of it and get nothing, and teams do this constantly.
The Scrum Guide names why. Successful use of Scrum depends on people becoming more
proficient in living five values. They are not decoration on top of the mechanics —
they are the thing the mechanics are for.
Commitment
The Scrum Team commits to achieving its goals and to supporting each other. Note what
is committed to: the goal, not a fixed list of items. A team that commits to
scope and calls it commitment has misread the word — and will discover it the first time
reality changes mid-Sprint.
Focus
The primary focus is on the work of the Sprint, to make the best possible progress
toward its goals. This is the value the Sprint Goal serves: something to focus
on.
Openness
The Scrum Team and its stakeholders are open about the work and the challenges. In
practice this means saying the uncomfortable thing at the Review and the Retrospective,
while it still costs little.
Openness is what makes empiricism possible. You cannot inspect what has been hidden,
and you cannot adapt to what you have not inspected.
Respect
Scrum Team members respect each other as capable, independent people. Respect is what
allows the Retrospective to attack a process without attacking a person — and what makes
it safe to admit you are stuck.
Courage
The Scrum Team members have the courage to do the right thing and to work on tough
problems. Courage is saying an estimate nobody wants to hear, raising an impediment that
implicates a decision someone senior made, or declaring an item not Done when everyone
would prefer it were.
How to tell whether they are present
Do not ask the team whether they value openness. Look at three things:
- Does anything uncomfortable get said in the Retrospective?
- Do the Retrospective actions from last Sprint actually get done?
- When an item is not finished, is it declared not finished — or does it quietly
appear as done with an asterisk?
In Agile Together
It is also why the four KRs are read from the board and never from your own assessment: self-scoring is exactly where openness quietly fails.
Next
Next: how you define your Objective — the first practical decision of the course.
Agile Together is a free course. The package — scripts plus a portable Python — is a single download: get the course package. You install nothing.
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Project Management