Pretty interesting point!

I think we are two focused on what Scum is and how it is implemented\adopted within a particular team. Regardless of term you prefer to use – Scrum Master, Dev Manager, or some stuff like this – it is important to realize that the offshore teams usually doesn’t exists on its own account. They belong to organizations which in turn has its own rules on how to make the business. And the most important one is to keep the communication channel under the control. If they don’t, organizations itself might become the impediment. From this perspective, it is doubtful that the offshore teams would ever be able to implement “pure” Scrum since there is always be a person who decides who of the teammates is allowed to talk to the client and who aren’t.

>>”However, I’m noticing a pattern emerging, especially between onshore-offshore teams that have adopted agile recently.”

Some time back, I posted thoughts on the similar topic “Story of Scrum: More of a selling point than actually doing it right”

http://jaibeermalik.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/stroy-of-scrum-more-of-a-selling-point-than-actually-doing-it-right/

Definitely the distributed agile has its own challenges and different organizations handle those in different ways. Some put few experienced people to hide the state of team agility, like you said use SM as single point of contact and some organizations do it the right way.

The problem itself may be somewhat/somewhere else:

-Team not much aware of the true spirit of Agile
-Management not yet ready to change the old mindset of projecting SM as Manager and hiding team progress from client/PO
-Team not using scrums of Scrum properly (removing impediments across teams etc.) and intra-team collaboration being minimum.
-Communication is backbone of distributed-agile, whether junior or senior member. Either equip junior members to handle that or you don’t have the right people on board, the organization do not the strategy in place to do the distributed agile or all the concerned parties are just happy with what is just working).

I also mentioned the similar problems in the above post link. For some teams the new pattern works fine which may be because either they do not know the right way, have not experienced it yet or may be it will take some more time for them to learn themselves and understand it.

“Have you seen any offshore teams that allow direct communication between a junior dev and a PO who is abroad?” I’ve seen plenty of organisations where that’s not prohibited, yet just isn’t done, for cultural or sometimes personal reasons. It’s a coaching responsibility (which a Scrum Master may want to take on) to give teams and individuals permission to break out of dysfunctional self-or-culture-imposed patterns, and it’s a team member’s responsibility to rise to this challenge.

Still there’s no easy way to stop it as long as you live in a high-context world. In the past, I’ve managed this by hiring a local off-shore coordinator that speaks to the off-shore team and accepts work from them in the form of CVS patches. The off-shore team may be run as it’s own SCRUM team or not, but the off-shore team still has it’s own velocity and that velocity is taken into account when planning new iterations. The overhead management is still there, and is still a challenge, but it’s planned for.

Hope this helps.

I have to echo Tobias’s assessment that if a developer on the team does not have access to the empowered Product Owner, it’s not Scrum. Doesn’t matter if the PO is halfway around the world and the developer is an un-degreed intern. The PO and any team member need to have direct communication.

It’s great of you to voice what you are seeing. More and more ScrumMasters and companies are dealing with distributed teams. And some teams have politics in the way of communication even in the same building. The trick is to find a way to solve the disconnect so the bottle neck is not present.

Whether you call it Scrum or not, it is rare to see a junior developer have direct access to the PO who is often an executive from the parent/client company abroad. Invariably information flows through the ScrumMaster, simply because the SM is usually the seniormost person who is local to the team.

What has been your experience with companies in this situation?

If the team has no access to the PO you are not doing Scrum. Simple. Calling someone “PO doesn’t make it so, and if the person doesn’t collaborate with the team you lose all possibility of creating the right software.

The only potential bottleneck when Scrum is done well is between the PO and the real customer (if they are not the same person). When a PO is not empowered to make decisions this can cause a bottleneck — and it also causes a disempowered state for the whole team. PO’s MUST be empowered to act on behalf of the customer/s and not be a go-between.

The ScrumMaster is not a go-between of any kind. He is an agent of change within the organization, supporting his team and educating and socializing Scrum outward towards other parts of the org. Doing his job well he has no time to be in the way of the team and any person or group they need to talk to.