Tag Archive for: scrum master

Growing as a Scrum Master and Beyond

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Last Wednesday, the 11th of November, we ran our webinar "Growing as a Scrum Master and Beyond"! This topic clearly resonated with many, as we set a new record number of participants. We spotted familiar names who have been following us over the years, and many new names we hope to see again. It makes us happy to see our webinar network growing! 

We had the great honour of welcoming two guests on this webinar, Jelena Vucinic and Bob Stomp, who joined our CSP-SM training this fall. Together with agile42 trainers & coaches, Giuseppe De Simone and Niels Verdonk, we hope they provided you with the content you were after. 

As the coaches mentioned early on in the webinar, being a Scrum Master in a company is much more than just attending a 2-day training to get certified. Whilst your role is to primarily coach the team, it is also to teach, give advice, be a mentor and role model of the Agile and Scrum values and principles. This is not always an easy task. The knowledge and skills you need as a Scrum Master will grow through education, perhaps some additional coaching and most of all the experience and support of other Scrum Masters in your organization and network. 

As Jelena mentioned during the webinar, a typical day for a Scrum Master is not only to facilitate Scrum meetings, however a multitude of other undertakings. You observe the team, prepare for meetings, follow-up action points from meetings, handle impediments, have 1-on-1 meetings with the team members and stakeholders when needed and think about new ways in which you can help your team.

The webinar attendees were particularly interested in the ways you can grow as a Scrum Master, for which there are various paths. You can of course take the training provided on the Scrum Master growth path as visualised in the diagram below. Each training goes deeper into the content of the Scrum Master, and you will gain valuable new skills and learnings to add to your toolbox. The below diagram shows the steps to become a CSP-SM: 

 

We recommended reading The Hitchhikers Guide to Agile Coaching and checking out the post on 5 books we believe every Scrum Master should read.

Other training we offer is the Advanced Team Coaching Course which we recommend for those who already have CSM certification. There is also the ICAgile Team Facilitation Certification to support you as a Scrum Master. Furthermore you could consider coaching from one of our Agile coaches, for example, to grow you or your team of Scrum Masters.

Many of you listening asked us about the whole CSP path, how to grow skills and mindset as well as next steps after CSP-SM certification, and we feel that depends on what skills you wish to deepen. Below you can see examples of next steps, and our Mentoring programme can assist you on these paths. Mentoring is a long term commitment both from your side and the Mentors side, and this is a great opportunity to meet like-minded people, and to grow and learn together. 

If you would like to explore next steps on your individual growth path and/or like to enquire about our Mentoring programme after the CSP-SM, please get in touch with us and we would be happy to help.

Our upcoming trainings can be found here - take the next step on your journey with us!

The recording is available online. Feel free to watch it again and share with your network. It is also available on YouTube.

 

Below you will find the slides, with some further content. Please also feel free to share the slides around.

 

Connect with us on social media, to stay updated with blogs, webinars, training and other events which support your learning journey :) 

 

Have a great weekend, and don't forget to check out post and upcoming webinars!

To Scrum Or Not To Scrum

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I get many questions in my trainings, and one of the most common is when to use Scrum – usually preceded by utterances of “Scrum will never work in my team…” The wording of the question below comes from the Scrum Alliance Certified Team Coach (CTC) application. So this topic is relevant, and there is no one answer.

The Question

When might you advise a client to apply XP, Lean or a non-Agile approach to workflow instead of Scrum?

Let me answer this question by describing an actual situation. Read on for my thoughts.

The Context

I once coached a program of teams at a large corporate that had to automate a manual and laborious business process onto an off-the-shelf product. This program had been working in a waterfall manner for a year and had managed to automate a small subset of the business process.

A new CIO was employed and decided that this program needed to use Scrum because it would help with faster delivery. When I arrived this is what I found:

  • Teams had been set up, consisting mostly of contractors from different contract houses;
  • Most people had received an Agile Bootcamp training focusing on Scrum;
  • Project Managers were in-house and expected to be Scrum Masters as well;
  • Teams were supposedly dedicated, but the program manager repeatedly moved contractors in and out of the teams;
  • The deadline had already been decided by the CIO.

It became apparent that the teams were not set up for success and that the program would revert to using a waterfall process. I thought that by helping the teams focus on some of the principles of Lean without giving their way of working a label, that it would start them thinking about bottlenecks to their workflow and identify wasteful activities.

 

The Rationale Behind This Approach

Major organisational impediments which due to the nature of the organisation (size, structure, and politics) were outside of the teams’ control to resolve resulted in an interrupted value-stream, but for which they were being held accountable. Here are some of them:

  • Data sourcing – each business process was multi-layered with multiple data sources which the teams did not own nor have access to. Obtaining data required a long process with multiple approvals;
  • Environments – development, test and production environments were being built at the same time that the team needed them to do their work.

Program-level impediments:

  • Teams were not stable – people moved in and out without notice to them and the Project Managers;
  • No Scrum Masters – Project Managers were expected to also be Scrum Masters – this created a conflict of interest and anti-patterns began to emerge;
  • Teams did not own their full value stream and yet were held accountable for delivery;
  • Each business process to be automated was 1 large story because they were not easy to break down into user value items;
  • Teams consisted of more than 10 people and had 3 Product Owners.

I recommended that teams adopt Lean principles and visualise their work, in its imperfect form, and start improving where they could because:

  • The Product Owners were present and involved – there was a real effort on their part to help teams break their work down into manageable chunks taking into account the organisational impediments;
  • By visualising the workflow as it was they would start to see where all their bottlenecks were and having the teams and Product Owners focus on customer value they would begin to identify wasteful activities;
  • For me, it was also important to help teams see that their current process was not value-creating, and by regularly looking for improvements they would start to look for different ways of getting around that which was seemingly outside of their control.

There are other ways of addressing this type of problem, such as using a complexity frame and the Stacey Complexity Model. As with all things that relate to coaching, the context of the organisation and the maturity of the team are important. In order to help them become unstuck I guided them along this path and brought in the learnings of complexity later. I felt that this was, for these teams, a useful place to start.

What would you do? Please tell me below.