Scrum Roles External to the Team - 3Back - Scrum Training & Scrum Consulting 28-10-20 16:05

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Scrum Roles External to the Team

By Dan Rawsthorne

There are three common roles for

users on the Scrum Team:
ScrumMaster, Product Owner and
Team Member. This blog post will
break down the roles of people who
influence and interact with the
Scrum Team, but are NOT Team
Members.

There are three roles for people

surrounding the Scrum Team:
Business Owner (BO), Stakeholder
(SH), and Subject Matter Expert
(SME). The following discussions are simplifications of these roles, but provide a solid basis for
understanding them.

Business Owner
The role of Business Owner is used in order to discuss the Scrum Team’s relationship with its
Organization. The Business Owner refers to the person (or people) the Product Owner is (directly)
accountable to for the Team’s Work Results, and who often provides resources and assistance to
the Team.

Both the ScrumMaster and the Product Owner have a relationship with the Business Owner. The
ScrumMaster works with the Business Owner in order to help manage organizational impediments
and constraints so that the Team can be more productive. The Product Owner works with the
Business Owner in order to:

Determine the priority of up-coming work in the Backlog;

Consolidate the disparate needs of the Stakeholders;
Modify the Release Plan as necessary and
Get resources for the Team. Kayla is online

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Scrum Roles External to the Team - 3Back - Scrum Training & Scrum Consulting 28-10-20 16:05

The Business Owner is often thought of as the main (or lead) Stakeholder for the Team. In large
Organizations there is often a hierarchy of Product Owners and, in that case, the Business Owner is
usually the Product Owner’s Product Owner.

Stakeholder
Stakeholders are the reason a Scrum Team develops a Product in the first place; it is the
Stakeholders that have the needs, wants, and desires that the Team is trying to satisfy with the
work it is doing. Stakeholders are vital to the Team’s success, as they review the Team’s Product
and provide ongoing feedback. There are many people that are interested in the Product, but not
all of them are Stakeholders – some are merely interested bystanders.

The classic definition of Stakeholders is that they are people with ‘legitimate interests’ in the
project. I have a tough time defining ‘legitimate,’ so I have a more pragmatic definition. I say that
Stakeholders are people who should not be ignored; they are people who can have a negative
impact on the Team if they are not attended to.

I usually use the word Stakeholder (capital “S”) to mean stakeholders that are external to the Team;
it is true that Team Members are also stakeholders, but they are usually not the ones I am
discussing or worried about.

Subject Matter Expert (SME)

Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are people, external to the Team, with special knowledge or skills
that the Team needs in order to do its work. They are a special sort of Stakeholder, and many
Stakeholders are also SMEs. Each Scrum Team is supposed to have all the skills it needs within its
Team Members, but this is often impossible – so the Team must work with external SMEs.

SMEs can have knowledge in technical or business areas. They can be experts on the Stakeholder
needs (they could even be the Stakeholders with the needs), or they could have technical skills such
as architecture, database, or user interface expertise. Whatever… all I know is that the Team needs
their knowledge, but they’re not on the Team.

SMEs work with Team Members to provide missing expertise, but since they are not on the Team,
SMEs can be neither responsible nor accountable to the Product Owner for the work they do –
they don’t work for the Product Owner. This fact creates some interesting problems when working
with SMEs, and this issue is discussed in greater detail in chapter 2.5 of Exploring Scrum: The
Fundamentals which you can purchase on Amazon.

Discover More

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Scrum Roles External to the Team - 3Back - Scrum Training & Scrum Consulting 28-10-20 16:05

Upcoming Courses The Roles of The ScrumMaster Fitting In: Project Managers and Atomic Scrum ("Five People in a
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