frustration #3. Autocratic Decisions Overruled Democratic Decisions

Steve Jobs once said:

"It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do. We hire smart people, so they can tell us what to do."

However, this is precisely opposite of how most of the mainstream leadership used to operate to make decisions before the scrum era.

Before we had the scrum process in our organizations, autocratic decisions from leaders overruled the combined intelligence of their teams.

They invalidated the democratic decisionmaking ability of groups who were in charge

of doing the real works which spanned the entire software engineering lifecycle from the conception of software to its operations.

The remoter a decision was shifted away from work centers (teams) it impacted, the more difficult it was to give a correct mission-critical decision.

The judgments from leaders used to be usually impulsive, not thoroughly thought-out, mostly late and tentative, but sometimes even too early.

These autocratic decisions imposed from the top made employees feel undervalued. They entirely hindered the ability of their organizations to come up with creative and innovative solutions to handle competitive business and software-related challenges.

Furthermore, they discouraged software engineering teams from giving their inputs at the times when they're asked to contribute decisions.

It was a brief overview of how we used to develop and deliver our software services and

service products before we adopted the scrum framework in our organizations. Now let's have a look at how we sorted out these chaos and frustration elements with the help of the scrum process.