ScrumMasters Only Make Sense in Scrum

Quite often during the last few months, I heard people being frustrated with not functioning ScrumMasters. One reason for it described in a post Why Some Organizations are Laying of “ScrumMasters” is that those are not the real ScrumMasters, but hiring Scrum “Project” Masters, Scrum “Ceremonies” Masters, or Scrum “Jira” Masters which will neither help organizations to achieve their business goals nor people to feel better or do a better job and as such it can only result in “Dark Scrum”. But surprisingly there is a whole bunch of experienced ScrumMasters who are unlucky enough to be hired to traditional organizations as ScrumMasters to “manage” individuals who only focus on delivery. There is often no intent to change the way of working, managers are trying to keep the status quo and make sure the ScrumMasters have no power to introduce any practice. “You need to ask HR if you like to work with people. Just manage the ceremonies,” they say. I guess I don’t have to say that the whole experience is very frustrating for everyone. Teams are saying the ScrumMaster is not helping them and ScrumMasters burn out very soon. I usually say no to such an environment as they are not ready for a change. Personally, I always try to look for someone who would sponsor a change. If there is no willingness no bigger vision, then why am I here in the first place at all.

However, if I take such an opportunity, you need to start looking at the ScrumMaster role differently. In the first place, ScrumMaster is a leader. And that brings a whole new perspective on his role. As a first step, it’s about the vision, or I would even say a dream. Where do you want to see your organization or team? Why is it important? I rarely do anything because my job description says so, of it was in my KPIs. I did that because I believe that the individual people, team, and organization will benefit from that action. I often fight the system and most of the time challenge the status quo. So that’s where you need to start. Have a strong enough dream that is that you go for it no matter what. Even if you win the lottery, you will be going to work and trying to change things so that your dream becomes true. Sometimes there is a wrong perception that agile is about that sunny smiling environment and no performance. So let me be clear, the first thing you need to start with is business. I often ask organizations before I start helping them with change, implementing agility, or improving their current Agile/Scrum implementation why do you need to change, and they almost always say a number of reasons why is it important – predictability, time to market, customer satisfaction, flexibility, quality, technical debt, innovations, … Then I ask them what happen if they don’t change. Surprisingly, very often they pause and say well, nothing really. We are successful, we earn some money, we are good enough. So in many cases, they don’t feel the sense of urgency needed for a real change. And unless you help them to have a sense of urgency, no real change will ever happen. Can they improve? Yes. Can they adopt some practices? Most likely. But would they change their mindset and their way of working? Not that likely. So if you take a job somewhere, here are a few points you need to take care of.

To start with, answering the following three points is essential:

  1. Why – define business goals. How the organization is going to benefit from a change? Why is it important for us to change? What happens if we don’t change?
  2. Who – define your allies. Changing an organization is never one man show, it’s too complex for that, so create a team. It’s more creative and innovative and will better address the complexity of the system. Create a transformation team that will guide the organization around its agile journey.
  3. What – define your dream together, your vision of the change. What needs to change? What would it look like?

Once you initiate the change, you need to keep going.

  1. Communicate. And when you do so, communicate again. And again. And again. Agile brings very different way of working, different mindset, and different perspectives. Hearing it once is usually not enough.
  2. Remove obstacles. Transformation teams often create a transformational backlog with impediments and things that need to improve. For example, education and understanding, legal and contracts, PR and motivation, but also things like cross-functionality, self-management, individual goals, etc.
  3. Celebrate success. Even a small step is worth celebrating. Don’t forget that. It works for both teams involved and also for the people around who might get inspired and give it a try. Don’t forget that it’s not agile that scales. Success scales.
  4. Keep changing. Agile is about continuous change. Look for small improvements, and change step by step. You never going to be done, but you will always see progress if you look back. So don’t stop changing. There is always a better way.

Why Some Organizations are Laying of “ScrumMasters”

For some time there was a trend of laying off so-called ScrumMasters from mostly big organizations. At first, it looks like Scrum is over. However, I would be careful with such conclusions. When you look closer, they are not really firing real ScrumMasters but some sort of delivery managers as they often call them or as I described them in my previous blog post – Scrum “Project” Masters, Scrum “Ceremonies” Masters, or Scrum “Jira” Masters. And they are also hiring them for such skills and responsibilities so it is no surprise. Those employees are mostly just pretending to be ScrumMasters. The problem is they often lack agile experience, lack coaching and facilitation skills, are not trained, and their managers often expect them to micromanage the delivery as they were always used to having everything under control. In other words, the environment is still so traditional that without strong leadership, desire for change, and experience in changing organizations they burn out and give up. “It would never work at my organization”, they say.

Indeed without them initiating the change, it will never work. Every change needs significant energy to change the status quo. And one of the responsibilities of great ScrumMasters is to work at all three levels of the #ScrumMasterWay concept:

Firstly, at My Team level, they need to be able to build a team from a group of individuals. Help them to be self-managing and cross-functional so they can deliver value end to end. Explain to them the dynamics of Scrum, facilitate events, and help them to take over the ownership and responsibility for their way of working. Once the initial work is done and the team starts picking up, they need to coach them so they constantly look for improvements.

Secondly, at the Relationship level, ScrumMasters need to work with teams that collaborate on bigger products. Helping Product Owners to shift from a delivery mindset to a value mindset, build a real value-driven Backlog, and prioritize. Facilitating larger refinements with multiple teams, stakeholders, customers, and the Product Owner. Supporting Product Owners to take over the responsibility and ownership for the entire product success focusing on return on investment and customer satisfaction, not just delivery.

Finally, at the Entire System level, ScrumMasters need to help the entire organization to embrace agility. In other words, be more adaptive. Loosen their budgeting the planning cycles, and be ok with uncertainty. Implement a fast feedback loop, and don’t be afraid to inspect and adapt. By increasing the transparency step by step they need to build trust in this new way of working. It’s the only way how to sustain the current world of constant changes and be ready to solve complex business problems. Simply help the organizations to be ready for whatever the future brings.

All over ScrumMasters need to start their ScrumMaster journey at the My Team level. Working with small teams, experiencing what difference can Scrum and agility make at the team level. Learning about the dynamics of Scrum, self-management, and cross-functionality. The same skills and experiences are then applied to larger entities of Relationship and Entire System Levels. They learn on the way.

In order to be successful, large traditional organizations need a certain number of ScrumMasters experienced with the entire system level so they can coach the organization on their agile adoption journey. Hiring Scrum “Project” Masters, Scrum “Ceremonies” Masters, or Scrum “Jira” Masters will never help and can only result in “Dark Scrum” that not only doesn’t help the organization achieve their business goals but demotivates everyone and often results in firing those “fake” ScrumMasters. It’s sad, but it’s quite a common step for traditional organizations on their agile journey. Indeed you can skip it, and hire real ScrumMasters and start changing right away, but for many organizations, it’s too radical approach. They still hope they can be successful in dealing with complexity in nowadays constantly changing world without change. I don’t think so. I believe the change is inevitable. But we’ll see what the future brings, and what organizations will struggle, and what organizations will survive.

Who is Driving a Change in the Organization

Managers are very often asking me who is driving the agile transformation and expecting some special position like VP of Agile or Chief Agilist. To their surprise, there is no such position needed. I already wrote here about Agile Organizations and hierarchy. Real Agile Organizations are flat and lean, so they don’t create any new position for a problem, issue or initiative. In Agile Organizations, we already have ScrumMasters to introduce change.

“If you want to drive Agile transformation, you need to become ScrumMaster.”

It’s simple and straightforward. We don’t need another role, we don’t need another layer. Referring to the #ScrumMasterWay model, ScrumMasters are not only responsible for growing great self-organizing teams (My Team level), helping the ecosystems around their team to be self-organized (Relationship level), but also helping the entire organization to be self-organized (Entire System) and embrace agility at all layers. Scrum Masters competencies cover not only agile, business, and technical practices, but are also responsible for driving a change because, at the end of the day, agile brings significant change, new culture, a new way of working.

ScrumMaster is a leadership role, so it’s a good fit for managers who want to make a difference in the organization, who care about helping others to become leaders, who are passionate about changing culture, who are Catalysts. ScrumMaster is a Servant leader. They are not having any positional power, they can’t tell people what to do. But they have an influence. They can coach and facilitate to unleash the potential, helping people to find their own way of working. That’s what self-organization is about in the first place, that’s what agile transformation is about.

Give Christmas present to your ScrumMaster and leverage his/her knowledge

When I go around the Old Town in Prague I can feel the Christmas atmosphere – Huge Christmas tree is already decorated, a small market with gifts. The holiday season is here 🙂

#ScrumMasterWayIt’s a lot of tips everywhere what to buy as perfect Christmas gift to your husband, friends, children, parents. But I wasn’t able to find any tips for ScrumMaster gifts. So I decided to write some to make even ScrumMaster happier and leverage their knowledge.

There’s never enough knowledge and experiences. The first tip is to read a good book. I want to recommend my book The Great ScrumMaster: #ScrumMasterWay which is practically oriented, full of tips. It’s a field guide for every ScrumMaster, it got great feedbacks so I believe this book is a great gift. But let’s share more book tips – you can start with Essential Scrum from Kenneth Rubin which is the good starting point to understand the Scrum. If you want to move forward the next step is to get some coaching experiences. The Coaching Agile Teams from Lissa Adkins is the book you have to read. It’s great with a lot of knowledge from one of the best coaches I know. Another direction is scaling and a large project in huge organizations. The answer for scaling is LeSS – Large-Scale Scrum which is greatly described in the book Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS. If you are serious about scaling, this book is a must. Both authors Craig and Bas are excellent Scrum and LeSS trainers so it is worth to learn from them.

Prague - Old Town Square at Christmas timeIf you prefer a more entertaining way to get the knowledge you can join some training. It’s my second tip. Have you ever been in Prague? It’s one of the nicest cities in the world with charming Old Town, historical streets, Franz Kafka atmosphere, and a lot of good and cheap beer. So it’s a combo historical Prague & great party & awesome training. Take my Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) training explaining the #ScrumMasterWay concept and the way how to become the Great ScrumMaster. It will move your ScrumMaster knowledge to the next level! We also organize Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) class as well and the newest and most demanding CAL1 – Certified Agile Leadership class. Don’t wait and make this holiday & learning happen. Prague - Charles Bridge In addition to my already mentioned classes, you can join Certified LeSS Practitioner training with Jurgen De Smet who is regularly coming to Prague to enjoy the city and to deliver this great workshop. Check dates and availability here. Of course, you can join me at any place worldwide just check my Scrum Alliance profile or book private training for group of your ScrumMasters – team Christmas gift 🙂

Prague - Prague CastleMy last tip for ScrumMaster’s git is to attend the great conference. There’s a lot of great events I just want to mention two: Global Scrum Gatherings (in Minneapolis, USA in spring or London, UK in fall) or my favorite Agile Prague Conference 2018 (September 10-11, 2018) which is one of the best from Agile in Europe 🙂

Entire System – The World Dimension – The #ScrumMasterWay Concept

The world dimension of #ScrumMasterWay concept represents three levels ScrumMasters shall operate. The third element is called Entire System. Though the time and energy ScrumMasters spend on each level differ based on the team or organizational culture and maturity level, they have to be present at every level to keep an eye on changes. As organizations are complex systems, you can stay here forever. There is always some change which needs your attention, there is always a better way how we can do things, there is always a better way of work.

Level 3: Entire System

At this level, ScrumMasters shall look at the organization as a system, from ten thousand feet distance. Searching for organizational improvements. They shall become servant leaders, helping others to become leaders, grow communities, and heal relationships. Bring the Agile values to the organizational level. Address the system in its whole complexity and make it a self-organized network of great teams. At this stage, you can see your organization as a living organism. This living organism has one goal of which no one has doubts. This system takes experiments and learns from failures. The safety, transparency, and trust are deep in the system DNA. The culture value collaboration and trust which gives us an opportunity to come up with more innovative and creative ideas then hierarchical traditional structures.

#ScrumMasterWay - Entire System

You might feel you are done, you made it. Please celebrate, it’s a huge achievement. And then let me remind you, there is no end of your journey. The goal is to achieve the right mindset of inspect and adapt every day. Being Agile is the star on the horizon, you can never touch it, but in short iterations, you can get closer. That’s what Agile is all about.

If you are struggling about how to create such Agile organization and how to work at this Entire System level of #ScrumMasterWay concept, join my Certified Agile Leadership class (CAL) which we now offer as the only ones in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Relationships – The World Dimension – The #ScrumMasterWay Concept

The world dimension of #ScrumMasterWay concept represents three levels ScrumMasters shall operate. The second element is called Relationships. Though the time and energy ScrumMasters spend on each level differ based on the team or organizational culture and maturity level, they have to be present at every level to keep an eye on changes. If you do it right, and your organization is not too dysfunctional with a lot of politics and difficult stakeholders and product structure, what you build at the Relationship level, could be sustainable in about three years and gradually you may gain more and more time to the next level of the Entire system.

Level 2: Relationships

The Relationship level brings higher perspective. You are not focusing on the elements of the Myself dimension to the development team only but to the broader system. You look after all relationships your team has with anyone outside and use the mix of aspects from Metaskills, Learning, State of Mind and Leadership elements to improve them.

ScrumMasters focus their teaching, mentoring, facilitation, and coaching skills to improve relationships between the development team and Manager, Product Owner, customers, stakeholders, and other teams. For example, you may coach the Product Owner to build a great vision, facilitate conversation with other teams, help the manager to understand how to change the performance reviews, and much more. Whatever helps the bigger eco-system to become self-organized, consistent and coherent.

#ScrumMasterWay - Relationships

At this level, the eco-system begins to use the high capacity of the previously created high-performing teams in a meaningful way. We maximize work not done, is in the Agile manifesto. Too many companies are using Scrum just as a tool to deliver any idea which goes around. This level helps organizations to prioritize and focus on true value delivery. There are thousands of practices from this space you can teach (Story mapping, splitting patterns, Impact mapping, Lean startup, beyond budgeting, management 3.0). The list never ends, so keep in mind that it’s not about practices despite the fact that they can be useful but it’s about building the right Agile mindset. Increase transparency and openness. Help them to become a great team together with one goal.

My Team – The World Dimension – The #ScrumMasterWay Concept

The world dimension of #ScrumMasterWay concept represents three levels ScrumMasters shall operate. The first element is called My team. Though the time and energy ScrumMasters spend on each level differ based on the team or organizational culture and maturity level, they have to be present at every level to keep an eye on changes. If you do it right, and your organization is not too dysfunctional with people actively fighting against what you build at My team level, you shall be ready to move to the next level in about six months.

Level 1: My Team

The first level of #ScrumMasterWay concept is My team. Being ScrumMaster at My team level feels like being a team member. They look at things from the development team perspective: Explain different Agile practices, facilitate Scrum meetings, help to remove impediments, coach the team, and make the team great. If people are only aware of the existence of this level, we often hear that ScrumMaster can be a team member at the same time, or it can rotate, or it shall not be needed at all after some time. They are all huge misunderstandings of the ScrumMaster role.

#ScrumMasterWay - My Team

My team level is a great start. If you do it right, it will help you to demonstrate the success of Scrum, and show you a way to the next level of addressing product success, and building an Agile organization. If you do it right, the team becomes not only cross-functional, and self-organized, but high-performing as well. The team will be significantly better that anything you ever experienced before. More productive, always improving, proactive and taking over the ownership and responsibility for the overall goal.

You can’t skip this level, as this is something tangible, something which helps you to demonstrate success. Something which helps you to taste Agile for the first time. And get feeling how it shall be. The first Myself dimension will help you to address My team level and prevent you from falling into assistant or mother of a team. You are done when you build the great team from the group of individuals. You recognize it with a high level of energy, positivity, and activity in the team. Team members will be happy to go to work, they will enjoy it, and take other team members as friends.

Leadership – Myself Dimension – #ScrumMasterWay concept

Let’s continue with the last element of ‘Myself’ dimension. As we already said in the previous blog posts, each element of this dimension is represented by a dice which you can roll every day of Sprint and choose the aspect you are going to take. The fourth dice stands for leadership. If you want to transform the organization, your leadership style shall change first. In this element, we talk about being a servant leader, creating the culture, feedback, motivation, collaboration, and leader-leader style.

Servant Leader

ScrumMaster is a leadership role. One of the aims of ScrumMaster is to make others work better, they are servant leaders. They can heal relationships, create communities, listen to others, have empathy, and think beyond day-to-day tasks and short-term goals. Only when you become servant leader you can be the great ScrumMaster.

We Culture

Agile needs the right culture. It’s all about us, how we work as a team. Be collaborative, support each other, take over responsibility and ownership for the team. ScrumMasters shall be using their leadership skills to create such culture because without it Agile and Scrum can never be successful.

Feedback

Give and receive feedback is critical for every leader. It’s important prerequisite to inspect and adapt. ScrumMasters shall be actively searching for feedback and find creative ways to allow people to learn from it.

Motivation

Part of the motivation is coming from the environment and culture. ScrumMasters support intrinsic motivation factors as they are aligned with their goal to create a self-organized team. Motivate through an understanding of the purpose and clear goals, safe to fail learning environment, and open and transparent culture.

Collaboration

Collaboration is written in the Scrum DNA. Scrum is all about teams and collaboration. There is no individual work important in real Scrum, no individual goals. We do our best to achieve the goal – deliver value to the customer.

Leader-leader

The leader-leader model helps you to change the traditional leadership style of leader–follower where people are expected to follow orders into the leader-leader concept of servant leadership where leaders are here to help the other people to grow and become leaders themselves.

State of Mind – Myself Dimension – The #ScrumMasterWay concept

Let’s continue with the next element of ‘Myself’ dimension. As we already said in the previous blog posts, each element of this dimension represented by a dice which you can roll every day or Sprint and choose the aspect you are going to take. The third dice is for choosing the approach – State of mind. The approach you take is important and can completely change the result you get from addressing the different situations. For every situation, you can choose one of the following aspects: observe, facilitate, coach, remove impediments, teacher and mentor, and increase positivity.

Observe

Start every situation with observing. There is no rush. Then choose any of the following approaches, address the situation by facilitation, coaching, teaching and mentoring or increasing positivity and return back to observing to see how it landed. If it works, you can continue with the selected approach, if not it’s time to change. Keep in mind that you work at system level and systems are complex by nature so hard to predict their reaction. You have to inspect and adapt.

Facilitate

Almost every situation can be addressed by proper facilitation. You can prevent conflicts by keeping the discussion in the problem space and prevent the situations when people takes it personal. Facilitator you shall be neutral. It’s their agenda, you only take care of the discussion flow.

Coach

Coaching can help when the other approaches can’t. Coaching will raise awareness and grow the interest to learn or change. It will start thinking process and creativity. Through coaching you can help team to reach the next level and become great team.

Remove impediments

This approach is actually a trap for ScrumMasters. Way too many ScrumMasters takes this approach as a destination and become assistants or mothers. Instead, you can help team to identify impediments by proper root-cause analysis and help them to solve the impediments by themselves.

Teacher, Mentor

ScrumMasters shall be the subject matter experts with hands-on experience from Agile and Scrum environment. This approach is about sharing the knowledge and experience so people understand the purpose of individual practices, Scrum framework and Agile.

Increase positivity

Finally, increase positivity. Celebrate success. Search for short wins. The more positive the overall team and company environment is, the higher chance they have to become great high-performing team and bring overall organizational a success.

Learning – Myself Dimension – The #ScrumMasterWay concept

Let’s continue with the next element of ‘Myself’ dimension. As we already said in the previous blog post, each element of this dimension represented by a dice which you can roll every day or Sprint and choose the aspect you are going to take. The second dice is for learning. Scrum Masters shall learn new things every day. This element shows a direction where you can focus the learning activity to gain Agile, coaching, facilitation, business, change, and technical skills.

Agile

ScrumMasters you must be Agile enthusiasts, constantly looking for new practices, concepts, and ideas. Joining local communities, attending or speaking at conferences. Looking for trends where Agile is heading. The world is changing fast, so do Agile and Scrum.

Coaching

Without good coaching, you can’t create sustainable high-performing teams. So better start right away. There are many classes and books on coaching, plenty options to choose from. But after all, it’s all about practice. Start tomorrow and get better during the time.

Facilitation

Facilitation is critical especially when the team is not that mature. Be ready to facilitate not only during meetings but anytime. Every conversation can go wrong, and create a conflict or misunderstanding. Be on a watch for those situations.

Business

As part of the mentoring and teaching, you will need to understand the Agile Product Ownership. Have an idea on how to form a vision, how to prioritize, how to build the backlog. Help Product Owners with business Agility concepts.

Change

ScrumMasters are implementing change in organizations, they change their culture, and way of working. Such change is one of the hardest. You are change manager, change is your day to day job, so be better at implementing change.

Technical

Finally, the most controversial aspect of this element is technical. It’s controversial because as ScrumMaster you shall not be a team member at the same time as you will lose the overview. The technical aspect here points to the Extreme Programming practices as continuous integration, shared codebase, auto-tests and TDD, BDD, pair programming, regular refactoring, agile architecture and continuous delivery. They are critical for team success and every great ScrumMaster shall have a decent knowledge about them.