Learning from your peers

Long time no see. :)

Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches are often promoting pair coding and collaboration. The reason for that is very simple, the best way to learn is to learn from you colleague, that drives both of you into the new path of learning.

 But how about the SMs and Coaches themselves? One of my mottos is practice what you preach. Which means in this case, that you should also do pair working yourself. One of the great opportunities, if you are in a corporate environment like I am, is to work together with one of your colleagues. If you find this hard, it's again a good opportunity for learning. If it's hard for you, it's probably hard for other people as well. My case hardness comes from exposing myself, as good as also in bad. Very sensible thing I must say.

BTW. We as Coaches and Scrum Masters must grab all the possibilities.

Is the Scrum Master a leader?

Follow The Leader
  © Copyright John Fielding and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

Some time ago, I had small conversation in our company's Scrum Master mailing list and yet, there was no clear answer.


So if you check out Mike Chon's nice article about Six Attributes of the Good ScrumMaster and to me those attributes look like pretty much same attributes what a good leader should have. As a Scrum Master you lack old school management power, but good leader does not need it. Leadership comes from somewhere else, than artificial power.

Role of the Scrum Master (at least in our company) has been really vague. There are people from old Command & Control to people who are doing bare minimum which is basically calling up mandatory meetings in Scrum. What I think and how I teach is that Scrum Master is a leader and Scrum Masters must practice and learn leadership and they must be also supported by management to do that.

Dilemma of: Scrum from Above and Self-managed teams

Scrum values strongly self-managed teams, with a good reason and that probably works nicely, if Scrum has been taken first into use in R&D team(s) and after that it has spread up.

But when you are in situation where Scrum has been decided in the management and it has dropped to teams, situation is pretty much different. Job of a Scrum Master or an Agile Coach becomes very interesting when you offer the gift of self-management to persons who are absolutely not wanting it.

This is again the situation where your people skills are far more valuable than technical skills, because changing people to think that self-management is rather like freedom than a cage of responsibility, is a challenging task.

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...

Does a Scrum Master become impediment to Agile transformation.

I must clear myself a little bit. :) I really believe that there is huge amount of work for higly skilled Scrum Masters during the transformation from Waterfal/C&C model to the Agile/Self management-mode. But where I'm heading with my topic?

This queation raised when I read Mike Summer's blogging about Situational Coaching with Agile Teams


Scrum Master is presented as a guardian of Scrum Proccess and also facilitator, impediment remover, coach etc. But the aim of the whole thing, in team perspective, is to get team in self management mode and actually, I truly believe that with a good team, there is no more place for Scrum Master. Which is paradoxal and people have a tendency for wanting to feel needed and if a person is not ready to move on (to the next team, to do "real" work etc.) does he become impediment to the team to move real self management or even organizing mode?