You’ve put in the work and you’ve secured your very first job as a scrum master. Congratulations! Now what? Your first scrum master job is an exciting time for growth and change – for yourself and for your teams. It can also be scary, stressful, and mystifying. If you’re experiencing all of these feelings, you are not alone. Here’s what you can expect in your first scrum master year.
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I’ve never worked in tech, nor used scrum, but people tell me I’d make a good scrum master. Where should I start?
I get this question from time to time. In fact, I got it today. A good starting point is to read some short introductory articles and watch some videos. Here’s a collection that I recommend.
Want to know a secret to making decisions that will lead to better outcomes? Not so fast. Well actually, not too soon. The timing of when you make your decision will have a big impact on how well things work out.
Our natural tendency is to decide too early. It gives us the illusion of certainty. The problem is that you don’t know what you don’t know. Early decisions are made with less information than those we make later. Of course, it is possible to wait too long. You want to make decisions at the last responsible moment. This is the point where the cost of delaying the decision rises to meet the benefit of waiting for more information.
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Organizations that are scaling up with scrum often find that Everyone Is Busy But Delivery Is Slow. This syndrome is usually caused by a lack of visibility into what people are working on, poor prioritization, and too much work in progress. The more work in progress we have, the more overhead we incur. We have meetings about the work. We create and read dashboards, reports, emails, and chat messages about about the work. People are doing all this work in order to achieve goals. Where are the goals coming from? Which ones are most important? Getting control of work in progress requires effective management of the goals.
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Everyone is super busy, yet things take forever to get done. I encounter this at organizations that are scaling up with scrum. All too often, leaders want to jump to a solution, such as implementing a scaling framework. Sadly, implementing a ‘fix’ without a deep understanding of the causes of the problem will likely make things worse. Blindly implementing the framework will make people even busier and things will take even longer to get done.
Exploring and understanding the root causes of the problem is a better starting point. Read the full article…
By: Season Hughes
So where do you start?
Inspired by the Toyota Production System, Mary and Tom Poppendieck describe the seven wastes of software development as: partially done work, extra features, relearning, handoffs, delays, task switching, and defects. In this video from the February Scrum Professionals MeetUp, Kim Poremski explores the seven wastes and introduces tools and techniques to overcome the seven wastes and unlock organizational agility and scalability.
A great way to continue your agile learning journey is attending conferences. You’ll learn, build your professional network, and earn SEUs to renew your scrum certifications. To make the conference selection process easier, or harder, we’ve published the most complete list of scrum, agile, and agile adjacent conferences on the web.
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It was a bad day at Geekaplex. A star developer’s computer had crashed hard, taking a week’s worth of new source code with it. The big boss was furious! I spoke up, “We need source control and a backup system.” The big boss looked at me and said: “Get some people together and make it happen!” I called my first-ever meeting and invited all of engineering.
Nominal Group Technique (NGT) is a facilitation tool that helps a group quickly build a comprehensive list of ideas, issues, options or solutions, and then select the best one(s). NGT works faster than traditional brainstorming, yet generates more complete and higher quality results. NGT prevents the quieter voices from being overwhelmed and allows each participant to contribute to their full potential.
The Nominal Group Technique was developed in the 1970’s by Andre Delbecq and Andrew H. Van de Ven. The effectiveness of NGT has been validated by subsequent research.
Let’s see how NGT can be used by a scrum team to create working agreements for their scrum events and other meetings. Such agreements are often called meeting ground rules.
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