Ben is a project manager with experience in developing digital services and products for worldwide clients. He’s learned some very important lessons and shares some of his key insights with you in this special episode, where we dive deep into the project manager role and the project management world.
Continue reading BONUS: Ben Aston on Project Management lessons that Scrum Masters can use
There are quite a few books out there about the Scrum Master job. However, the classic that many refer to over and over again here on the podcast is Scrum Mastery by Geoff Watts.
In the description of the publisher writes: “Scrum coach Geoff Watts has identified patterns that separate a good Scrum Master from a great one”.
As a podcast for Scrum Masters, we wanted to have Geoff on, to share the key insights in the book, but also what he learned since the book was first published in 2013.
But, before we go into those new lessons learned, let’s quickly review some of the key insights from the book
Read on for the detailed show notes and all the links…
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When Geoff was starting out his own Scrum Master journey, like many of us, he started as a Project Manager who was trying to adopt a new approach to the old work. Back then, we had very few books available. Agile Software Development by Beedle and Schwaber was the book we all read.
Like us, Geoff had to make a lot of mistakes and “learn by doing” what being a Scrum Master was really about. While in that journey Geoff started to appreciate the importance of a behavior that many previous project managers are not familiar with. Holding the silence in the conversation. We often get tempted to break the silence, but silence can allow team members and other stakeholders to come forward and take responsibility.
We also discuss what are some of some other actions that truly great Scrum Masters take as opposed to the good Scrum Masters.
Geoff also has a lot of lessons and ideas to share with those of us who are moving from a Project Manager position to a Scrum Master role. The key lesson is to give ourselves time to reflect. “Build time in your day to learn what worked and didn’t work, and detect your project managers traits.”
But there are many more lessons. Be open about your failures, your behaviors that come from the previous position. Be deliberate about what you want to change in your own behavior to adopt a Scrum Master role in all its depth.
This is the core question in our Success Thursday here on the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. But what does success mean according to Geoff Watts?
Geoff takes a similar stance to the one many of our guests share on the podcast. A great Scrum Master aims to do themselves out of a job. In practice that means they help the team manage conflict on their own; work well with the Product Owner; collaborate with each other; and remove – by themselves – impediments to the team’s productivity or agility.
However, it takes time to get there, and we are sometimes too quick to judge the teams we work with. Perhaps one required condition before we can reach success is to accept the team as it is when we start working with them and pick a place where to start. The journey is long but worth it!
When Geoff looks back to the book he wrote before 2013, he feels that it is as if another person wrote it. He’s collected many lessons since then and shares those on the podcast. However, there’s something he wants to highlight.
Today, Scrum Masters are expected to be coaches, and they don’t necessarily have the experience or education to perform that role. Geoff’s written a book about that aspect of the role of the Scrum Master, in The Coach’s Casebook Geoff and Kim Morgan try to explain the 12 traits that trap us when trying to be a coach, and share case studies where “the coach shares their emotions, their thought processes and their reflections from coaching supervision as they try to understand the psychological origins of these behaviors and to work out how to help their client”.
But being a coach is not the only aspect that he feels should have had more space in the original Scrum Mastery book.
Another aspect that Geoff has studied and gotten a lot more experience on since the original book was published in 2013 is the Agile Scaling trend that we have seen emerge.
Geoff shares his unique perspective on the process of scaling as well as why scaling is not really about the size of organizations or more teams, but rather a cultural challenge that our organizations face.
As we review how the Scrum Master role has evolved over time, it is inevitable to look at what else has changed. And the key question we all must face is about which obstacles we face when adopting or expanding the use of Scrum in our organizations. In this regard, Geoff does not see much difference, except in one aspect: it is now, more than ever, crucial that we adopt Agile and Scrum to enable our organizations to survive the competitive landscape. Back in 2001, when Geoff started with Scrum, there were not many organizations using Agile or Scrum. Now there are plenty of competitors, who are smaller, nimbler, more Agile than your organization.
Agile adoption has become a survival imperative.
Because Agile is now more spread, there’s a related challenge: people who want to work in an Agile environment will not stick around if your organization is not progressing in its Agile journey.
According to Geoff, retaining the talent you have is now a major challenge. This is more obvious in the Agile Coach and Scrum Master roles because people in those roles want to work in organizations that not only pay lip-service to Agile but are actually actively adapting that new way of working.
Scrum Masters all over the world are faced with the necessity to serve multiple teams. In some companies, we still question the value that Scrum Masters can bring. This “meeting secretary” anti-pattern of the Scrum Master role is not easy to remove.
In this episode, Geoff shares his own view on this topic, as well as some tips on how to introduce the idea of a dedicated, and full-time Scrum Master to your leadership. A must-listen for anyone who is facing this problem right now.
We end this episode talking about the role of the Product Owner. Geoff Watts wrote Product Mastery, a book that helps both Product Owners and Scrum Masters to understand that role.
Helping Product Owners is a key aspect of the Scrum Master role, so we must endeavor to understand and support people in that role. This, in turn, means that Scrum Masters must get up to date with that role, and develop experience in facilitating key meetings/workshops (see our FREE Vision Workshop e-course, and our Story Mapping Facilitiator guide) for Product Owners who need to be more focused on the content, and preparing the needed artifacts that support the team.
This is a value-bomb filled podcast episode! Happy listening!
About Geoff Watts
Geoff Watts is the founder of Inspect & Adapt Ltd and one of the most experienced and respected Scrum coaches in the world. Geoff helps individuals create great teams by developing a culture of reflection, empowerment, and engagement.
He started using Scrum at British Telecom, one of the first large-scale agile adoptions, Geoff, then coached organizations large and small through their agile journeys.
He’s also the author of 3 books, including Scrum Mastery, from good to great servant leadership. A book we explore in this episode of Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast.
You can link with Geoff Watts on LinkedIn and connect with Geoff Watts on Twitter.
You can also connect with Geoff Watts on Instagram and on watch Geoff Watts on YouTube.
When organizations start with Agile, they typically focus on the work that needs to be done at the team level. In many organizations we have “water-scrum-fall”, a little bit of Scrum squeezed inside two big buns of a plain waterfall.
The reason for that is that organizations don’t change as a whole. Typically Agile adoption starts in Engineering/R&D and slowly spreads throughout the organization. At some point, it bumps against the slow moving, but very powerful finance department. Where are all the financial decisions are made, including how to fund projects, and where Procurement has a key role. How do we change Procurement (buying software development) to fit Agile organizations?
That’s the topic we explore with Mirko Kleiner, a pioneer in the Lean-Agile Procurement movement.
Read on for the detailed show notes and all the links.
When Agile broken into the scene, it was mostly about the techniques to develop releases of the product quickly. However, that was a time when products were released only a few times a year at best. Today products evolve continuously and that changes how product Owners and Product Managers need to interact with the teams. In this episode, we explore some of the key lessons Jeff has learned working with product organizations all over the world. In short: Product Managers also need to adapt to Agile, it’s not just the teams!
Read on for the detailed show notes and all the links.
In this episode, we explore some of the critical lessons Jeff learned in his own career as a Product Owner. We review the missing aspects in most Product Owner role implementations and discuss the tools that have helped Jeff as a Product Owner first, and later his students.
Read on for the detailed show notes, and all the links
For several years, the Agile community has been struggling with the use of Agile practices – developed for small teams – in the large. Large organizations or multi-team efforts are the rule, not the exception in the software world. In this episode, we explore Nexus, a scaling framework developed by Scrum.org to tackle just that: the use of Scrum in larger organizations and multi-team product development efforts.
Read on for the detailed show notes and all the links.
For this first Christmas 2018 special we focus on scaling Agile, and specifically how the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) can help organizations take Agile and apply it in the large.
There are many systems that require multiple teams to work together. As more and more industries adopt software as a core part of their services and products, we also see many organizations developing many products concurrently, and large engineering organizations that require coordination across tens or hundreds of teams, including non-software teams.
In this episode, we discuss how SAFe can help you take Agile to that type of environments and organizations.
Read on for the detailed show notes, as well as all of the links.
Continue reading BONUS: Dean Leffingwell on scaling Agile and the Scaled Agile Framework, SAFe
In this episode, we explore The Core Protocols, a set of ideas developed by Jim and Michele McCarthy as they investigated the causes of performance improvement in teams.
During that research, Jim and Michele discovered that high-performance teams did a lot of things in a similar way, and we explore some of those patterns that successful teams take on.
The Core Protocols not only describe the patterns of successful teams, but also act as a “map” of the things we need to consider when helping our teams.
Read on for the detailed break down of the episode…
Continue reading BONUS: Richard Kasperowski on on high-performance teams and The Core Protocols
Tom and Mary Poppendieck have authored several books over the years about what needs to change in how we develop software to be able to meet the demands of the market, competition, and the growth in complexity of technology businesses. A recurring pattern they have witnessed is that people keep trying to discover a “silver bullet”. We explore why that is a bad idea and some of the changes in product development that make it an impossible quest.
Read on for the details, and all the links shared during the show.
There was an article in early 2017 stating that Scrum Master is one of the top 10 best paid jobs in IT in the USA (LinkedIn Data Reveals the Most Promising Jobs of 2017)
This inspired Stefan Wolpers to do a survey on the salaries that Scrum Masters can ask for world-wide. From this survey came the Age of Product Scrum Master Salary report of 2017.
According to the Scrum.org and Scrum Alliance websites we have now more than 500 000 Certified Scrum Masters or Professional Scrum Masters. With these kinds of numbers, it is clear that there is a demand for our profession. So what does that mean? How is the breakdown between countries and women vs men employed in this profession?
According to the report that Stefan compiled, there’s no significant difference between women and men when it comes to salary level. However, even if the profession has more women than the overall programming/technical professions, it is still a male-dominated profession (30% of people that replied to the survey are women).
When it comes to education, having a bachelor or similar degree plus hands-on experience seems to be the right level of qualification for aspiring Scrum Masters. Having one certification makes sense, but according to the survey there’s no significant effect of having more than one certification.
Finally, the organizations that hire Scrum Masters seem to be firmly rooted in the Product Development industry. Which begs the question: when will Scrum break-out of IT and product development? What is your view?
An interesting aspect of the survey is that it reveals that many Scrum Masters are under the PMO (Project Management Office) umbrella in most organizations. We discuss why this is and what this might mean in terms of the Agile adoption process in certain organizations.
There are currently many different options as to how to govern software development in product organizations. We have SAFe, LeSS and other scaled framework and Oikosofy’s own Agile Portfolio Management governance framework. The Project Management paradigm is however, still the dominating paradigm, and we discuss what that might mean.
If you are interested in more details, and all the data from the Salary Report, you can download it in the Age of Product website.
What did you think of the results? Are they coherent with your experience?
About Stefan Wolpers
Stefan has been working as agile coach and product owner for fast growing, mainly Berlin-based startups for about 10 years. He is writing on hiring agile practitioners, Why agile fails?, and curates Age of Product’s “Food for Agile Thought” newsletter.
You can link with Stefan Wolpers on LinkedIn and connect with Stefan Wolpers on Twitter.
