Cowboy Coaches

I have noticed this phenomenon where Agile Coaches are like lonely riders, with their six shooters loaded with silver bullets and they come to tell you (probably also little bit arrogantly), what you have to do to get yourself more Agile. Most sad thing in that is that they are not helping their cause. Getting Agile and being Agile is a really hard work, at least in the corporate environment where I am operating, and it does not happen easily and during this never ending journey more questions than answers have arisen . Acting like that just pisses people off.

Actually I have also been there. After my Certified Scrum Masters Course, held by Bas Vodde (was great course btw.) I thought I was ready, and I had my moment of revival. Now 2 years has passed from that and I have all that time worked in the same project, and I feel more humble now :)

To the end, small related quote.

"There ain't no way but the hard way. Get used to it."
- Airbourne

Journey from Scrum Padawan to Scrum Master

I have been a Scrum Master now little bit over one year and now I want to share my thoughts.

I have heard from time to time, that a Scrum Master job takes only about 5 - 10% of your time and frankly I believe that can be even less. If you use only minimum effort to be a Scrum Master, you need only summon couple of meetings (Daily Scrum, Retrospective) and that's it. If a team is extremely good and self managed you don't even really need to facilitate those meetings.

But if you want to take your job seriously and your organization and team is not mature enough, here comes the real work, and now I mean this heavy impediment removal. There might be huge things, like collaboration between different stakeholders. There might be some big technical problems, which are not easy to fix and they are affecting everybody's daily life. Your team can be really dysfunctional caused by some personal level problems. And you should also be the guy who are searching all the time better working practises and introducing them.

Question is, how to improve? 2 days Certified Scrum Master training is not enough, not even close but it's a good start. First thing is that you must decide that you want to be a better Scrum Master, after that learning by doing, starting to read books about the issue and following blogs, tweets and pod-casts of people who are practising this field of profession.

and my journey continues...