I have learned many things in my journey with Scrum, and I continue to learn on a daily basis even after 15 years of practice with it. Scrum is simple but deep and the lessons I learn make me a better Agile Coach and Scrum Master. One of the things I have learned over the years was what commitment means in Scrum. I used to think it meant the team committing to get the full scope of work done during a sprint, that it was about a promise to get everything done. This was just wrong of me and a hold-over from my command and control days as a project manager. It was a remnant of the illusion of certainty that waterfall fosters. It was at its heart a fear reaction to the uncertainty of the sprint backlog. I had the idea then that commitment meant taking the work in sprint chunks and promising to get each one done instead of the whole, and that this was progress. The reality was that I figured out that the sprint backlog is just as emergent as the product backlog and just as uncertain. There is no way a team can commit to the sprint backlog and no reason that they should.
The team commits to many things but the sprint backlog is not one of them. The team commits to the sprint goal, they commit to their definition of done and applying it to all of their work. The team commits to the rules of Scrum and the values of Scrum and the principles and values of the Agile Manifesto. The team commits to doing the best job they can. They commit to learning. They commit to teamwork. These are powerful commitments, and they are commitments to each other and themselves. Scrum does not function well without commitment to these things, and you can tell the health of a team by their level of commitment to these things. Commitment to the scope of the sprint backlog is a fool’s errand, and I am happy that I learned this and sad about the teams I worked with before I learned this. I am not now nor will I ever be perfect, but this does not stop my reaching for perfection, does not stop my commitment to continuous improvement of myself. I take my commitments to these lean and agile values seriously, and so I keep learning and growing and hope I never stop.