Spikes And Stories

Scrum tips and agile insights from a Silicon Valley agile coach

A Scrum Master’s Guide to Working With a New Team

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I’ve written before about how a Scrum Master can begin working with a new team, and lately I’ve been experimenting with a new technique.  I won’t rehash what I’ve written already, but it’s important to understand that my previous advice still applies:

  • It’s about them—not you—so put your agenda aside.
  • If possible, shadow the team for a sprint as a means to understand how they’re all connected together. Shadows can’t talk so stay quiet.
  • Ask tons of questions to understand not to persuade. And remember.

When you’re not terribly smart, it helps to be a good listener.

Jerry Weinberg

Set up time individually with each team member.  Thirty minutes usually does the trick.  I walk in with three topics as a means to draw them out, and today, we’ll talk about the first of those three.  In a future post, we’ll talk about the other two.  And it begins with a triangle.

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How Do I Foster Trust Within My Team?

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I’ve been mentoring a group of young Scrum Masters for the last seven months, and recently one of them asked me a question:

How do I foster trust within my team?

Immediately, two thoughts came to mind:

  1. They’ve been listening.  Affecting change isn’t about process, mechanics, or imposition.  It’s about people.  It’s about helping others, and I couldn’t be prouder that this question came to mind.
  2. It’s a freakin’ tough question to answer.  My response was far more philosophical than practical.  In the moment, no simple, straight forward answers came to mind so I’ve been chewing on it since.

But why?  Whether family, friends, or colleagues, we’re surrounded by people most times of the day, and our relationships with others are built on a foundation of trust.  For example, we trust that the car next to us driving at highway speeds will stay in its own lane.  When a  friend offers to drive us to the airport, we trust s/he will show on time so we catch our flight.  After all these years, we should have a handle on this trust thing, right?

I wish that were so.

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Practical Advice for Managers in an Agile Shop

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In my last blog post, I wrote about the side effects of manager as Product Owner.  In it, I talked about how I believe these roles should be filled by different people.  So if the manager isn’t directing the work, what’s s/he doing? How does a manager help his/her people when they’re distributed across multiple teams?  The Scrum Guide is silent on the topic, and although I offered up some of my own opinions in Managers in an Agile Shop, I didn’t offer much practical advice.  Let’s fix that.  Today, I’ll bias my advice toward the actionable, and I think it all can summarized in these wise words by Ed Catmull:

It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks.  It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.

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Why Manager as Product Owner Will Usually Fail

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The Scrum Guide doesn’t talk about the role of managers.  So does that mean that one day we have managers, and then as soon as we begin an agile transformation, they suddenly disappear?  Of course not.  So what do we do with them?  Many organizations use managers to direct the work of their reports so it could seem reasonable to assign these managers as Product Owners.  I can see the logic in this, but a younger me would have opposed this with extreme prejudice.  A younger me would use all my persuasive might emphasizing how this isn’t the right thing to do.  But why?  What’s wrong with it?

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