As a Scrum Master, Tell Me about yourself
My name is Rob and I am a Software Engineer for a large telecommunications company. During the day, I work on complex technical projects that support people’s lives across our industry. At night, I am also an author of Scrum resources and articles as well as a coach to other Agile practitioners within the company.
So what got me interested in Scrum? While growing up, my father was involved with engineering companies such as BAE Systems (previously known as British Aerospace). Having seen his passion for technology firsthand had an impact on how I saw career opportunities in future-oriented fields like engineering or IT development in general right from when young years onwards that led me down this path until deciding to pursue software development back in 2014 after finding out about agile methods through various sources online and watching their implementation by teams around the world from local conferences to international events like Agile 2011 Conference held by ThoughtWorks when it was still based in India – Bangalore. Although initially skeptical about applying these principles to day-to-day work situations, seeing teams successfully implement them made me change my I have been a part of various teams across multiple companies in my career and have seen firsthand how difficult it is for people to be on the same page about their roles, goals, and expectations as well as understanding each other’s context when not using an agile method. Although having a good idea of what this process looks like, seeing teams struggle with issues related to each other’s definitions, roles and responsibilities made me realize that there must be better ways of doing this instead of making people learn new skillsets which could also cause them to lose passion for the work itself. This motivated me to start learning about Scrum in 2014 after attending the Agile 2011 Conference by ThoughtWorks where I saw presentations by Ericrogers on The Art of Agile Development and JeffeyBrandson on How To Be A Better ScrumMaster.
Impressed by the content presented at both these sessions, I decided that those would be my first books to read regarding Scrum – ‘The Art Of Agile Development’ by Eric Rogers and ‘How To Be A Better ScrumMaster’ by Jeffery Brandson. These two books had a significant impact on how I started learning more about agile methods although they were aimed towards improving individual development practices within large organizations such as large software development teams or even entire product lines rather than individuals working alone (or small groups) within an organization. Having attended many local conferences back in India earlier such as BangaloreAgilityConferences prior to that, I saw a need for people like me who were interested in learning about Scrum to be able to meet up with other like-minded individuals and form local communities. This inspired me even further to start blogging regularly on the subject of Scrum which eventually led me to the career choice of being an agile coach.
I would say that most books written about Scrum focus on how it can be applied across an entire organization instead of focusing solely on individual development practices within teams. The reason being is that whenever organizations are adopting Agile best practices, they usually have multiple teams working together without having any one team fully understanding all the others’ responsibilities or roles which can cause issues if not properly addressed during the adoption phases as well as later on when changes need to be made or improvements made in general across the organization itself. That is why I believe it’s important for books aimed at improving individual developer practices within teams such as ‘The Art Of Agile Development’ by Eric Rogers and ‘How To Be A Better ScrumMaster’ by Jeffery Brandson discussed earlier, a necessity rather than just another book written purely on how to do things using Scrum since there are so many others out there already doing this effectively without writing a single word down themselves. It would have been great if those authors could have added chapters dedicated to creating effective scrum rituals within each team (which would help them become self-sufficient) and creating roles and responsibilities based on the Scrum framework and adapting them to each team’s unique situation. Then even if a manager or someone new comes in, later on, they would be able to adapt the existing practices for their teams instead of needing to start from scratch which is what happens quite often in many organizations regardless of their adoption phase.
Moving on, another aspect I found interesting was how the authors discussed the importance of self-organization within Agile teams and its relationship with information sharing which aligns well with my own views because it’s important for developers to have ownership over their work and not just blindly follow any instructions given by managers or anyone else in general since that can cause a lot of problems down the line if things change needs to be done post-implementation. In order for this self-organization process to occur, developers should also have autonomy over how they do their work as well as be empowered enough to make decisions without management always having the final say over every single thing (which is usually not possible especially when multiple people are involved) so that they feel comfortable tackling problems of varying complexity without constantly becoming overwhelmed. Having mutual trust among all members (especially between product owner/business stakeholders and developer) is also key since without their buy-in it becomes difficult for others involved such as testers or project managers etc., to fully support some changes going through due confidence levels need to be at 100% otherwise there will always be doubts about whether those proposed changes are actually beneficial or not.
