Accountabilities

The capitalized Accountabilities (formerly known as “Roles” in pre-2020 Scrum Guides) and Events in your contracts should be defined in Schedule B, with the greatest clarity possible, defendable in court when it must be decided who did or did not do their job as contractually defined.

You may find you need to scale all but the Developer roles hierarchically; make sure the delegation and escalation paths are clearly articulated upstream and downstream when doing so. There ultimately must be one person responsible for the strategy in backlog, and one person responsible for efficient delivery flow, irrespective of organizational depth or width.

1. Product Owner: The customer representative responsible for all items and all priorities, on all backlogs. May assign a decision-making delegate, name of the Product Owner (PO) and their delegate(s) should be recorded on each Schedule C.
2. Developers: all team members responsible for delivering a solution, specifically not just “Software Developers.” This should be a static set of people (and therefore fixed cost, fixed backlog item difficulty estimation) for the duration of Schedule A.
3. Vendor Scrum Master: The vendor representative responsible for the efficient and effective flow of value through the Developers. The name of the Vendor Scrum Master should be recorded on each Schedule C.
4. Customer Scrum Master: The customer representative responsible for the efficient and effective flow of value through the Developers, the escalation path for the Vendor Scrum Master. May not need to be dedicated to a single Scrum team. The name of the Customer Scrum Master should be recorded on each Schedule C.
5. Scrum Team: The Product Owner, Developers, Vendor Scrum master, and Customer Scrum Master, everyone in the team, typically 10 or fewer people.