Spikes And Stories

Scrum tips and agile insights from a Silicon Valley agile coach

What’s the Difference Between a Scrum Master and Agile Coach?

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A Medium follower asked me a few questions recently:

What’s the difference between a Scrum Master and agile coach? How can they both be involved in Scrum? Why is it seen as a natural ‘progression’ to move from Scrum Master to agile coach?

These are popular questions, and I’ve run across many–maybe too many, in fact–who have answered them in varying ways.  Maybe I should add my answers to the pile.  After all, I often describe myself as “a confused soul who can’t decide whether he’s an agile coach or a Scrum Master.”  Before I begin, my philosophy today is a simple one:

The name of a thing is not the thing.  Forget titles.  Forget hierarchy.  Focus instead on those around us and the value we create for those we serve.

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Six Reasons Agile Teams Deliver Frequently And Why It Matters

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Teams that don’t deliver working product frequently aren’t agile.

I hold firmly to this truth for many reasons.  For example, how can we iterate on a product that isn’t real?  Wouldn’t you agree that continuous improvement is at the heart of agility?  So if the product isn’t real, how can we be sure we’re learning the right lessons?  And how is “frequent” defined in this context? For that last question, read this blog post about metrics where I talk about what metric matters most.  It’s a simple one and one that’s typically easy to measure:

How often are we delivering working code to our target environment?

So why does this even matter?  What do these frequent deliveries get us?  Here’s six reasons agile teams delivery frequently: [Read more…]

What’s Your North Star?

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What’s my plan?  That’s a question I was asked recently.  It occurred to me in that moment that I didn’t have one.  Sure.  I had a vision, I knew the next few steps, and I knew where I wanted my teams to get.  However, the longer term was fuzzy, and it depended on how a few bets panned out. Those bets would tell me if I should amplify or dampen something we were doing.  So if I didn’t have a plan, what did I have?

I realized what I had instead was a north star.  Well, maybe a few of them.  Or maybe they’re better described as a set of heuristics?  Guiding principles?  I don’t know what to call them.  What I do know is I’ve collected them over the last decade as an agilist, and they drive my decisions and how I interact with world around me.  They look something like this:

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Breaking the status quo as Scrum Master

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Editor’s Note: Tanner here. I’m usually the one doing the writing but not today.  I ran into Sjoerd a few days back.  Awesome guy, great writer, and he has some refreshing perspectives on agility and Scrum Mastery.  Also, he’s been gratuitous enough to share his thoughts on my blog with all of you today.  For more from Sjoerd, click here.

Hey Scrum Master!

Here is to you, the battering ram, breaking through barriers that are barring your team from awesomeness.

It takes a lot of courage to be touching the raw nerves, to address the elephant in the room, to being radically transparent and enabling continuous improvement.

Introducing Scrum will involve dragging the company through its own dirt, exposing toxic politics and power plays. These invoke emotional reactions.

So how do you, as Scrum Master, keep breaking the status quo, without being a constant pain in the ass to your colleagues?

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