Responsive Advisors

Responsive Advisors

Do I Need Domain Knowledge to be an Amazing Scrum Master?

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Does a Scrum Master really need technical business knowledge? If you’re trying to break in the world of Scrum, you might be asking yourself: Does a Scrum Master really need technical knowledge? Do they need business knowledge? I’m here to set the record straight.

it’s really common for a Scrum Master to come from a software development background or even project management. I’ve met a few that were business analysts or even quality assurance specialists. If this is you, you’ve already got a hugely strong background because former job required it.

Having a really broad background is extremely helpful because, well, software development teams working with businesses or working with technical teams in order to get value delivered by means of some sort of software or technical solution.  It’s equally important for a Scrum Master to have amazing people skills. They should have an understanding of what makes a team great. They should have a ton of curiosity. They should be patient. They should be self-starters.  And of course, they should always be looking for ways to improve everything.

While it may not be absolutely critical that a Scrum Master has business or technical domain knowledge, it is absolutely essential that a Scrum Master knows Scrum. Take those words literally: “Scrum Master.” Would you call anyone a master that didn’t understand Scrum? You need to know how to apply Scrum. You need to know how to remove the impediments that prevent Scrum from being successful in an organization. You need to know how to challenge teams in new ways to elevate their performance well beyond what they ever could’ve imagined.

When becoming a Scrum Master, it’s really helpful have a strong technical or business background. However, it isn’t absolutely required if you can get the job done.

And don’t forget, there are some great books every Scrum Master should read to be amazing at this job, so do check them out.

Three Books Scrum Masters Should Add to Your Reading List

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As a seasoned Scrum Master, you’ve probably already read every good book there is about Scrum. As you look to broaden your knowledge you may now find yourself craving something different. If you’re anything like me, you may appreciate learning complementary ideas that can help expand your skill set. Here are my top three books you should add to your holiday wish list.

#3 – The Toyota Way

Using operational excellence as a strategic weapon was at the heart of the Toyota Production System (TPS.) Many of the ideas used on modern software teams have common roots with TPS. There are some great ideas provided that address building a high-quality product with short lead times, empowering people doing the work to make good decisions, empiricism in developing processes, mistake-proofing to reduce quality assurance costs, impediment removal to go faster, the list goes on and on. Scrum in many ways was inspired “The New New Product Development Game” published by Harvard Business Review. Several of the companies studied in that research paper were inspired by Toyota. I highly recommend any Scrum Master looking to level up their skills read this book. It will give you new ideas about how to apply Scrum in non-traditional settings and teach you more about why these ideas work to deliver amazing products your customers love.

The Toyota Way – 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer – Jeffrey K. Liker

#2 – The Tipping Point

In general, spreading ideas about Scrum and agility in a large organization is a difficult task. I commonly get asked how a Scrum Master can get people who have not learned Scrum to understand what they and their team are trying to do with Scrum. If you have ever asked this yourself, this book is for you! In his book, Malcolm Gladwell explains with great detail exactly how a message goes viral. He talks about different types of people instrumental in spreading a message he identifies as Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. Malcolm also talks about what makes a message sticky. Overall I can’t say enough good things about this book if you’re trying to get a message to spread in your organization.

The Tipping Point – How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference – Malcolm Gladwell

#1 – How to Win Friends & Influence People

You might know everything there is to know about Scrum and agile software development, but if you can’t influence others as a Scrum Master you might as well find a new line of work. I like to think of this book as the unveiling of the secrets of life. We all want to be genuinely liked, to interest others, and be influential. This book that will teach you how to do just that. Are you struggling to win arguments? This book gives you great tips that are practical. Are you finding yourself with lots of enemies? This book teaches you how to avoid that. The ability to work with people is a critical skill every Scrum Master must have. I’d even go so far as to say every person should have these skills, which is why this is my number one pick.

How to Win Friends & Influence People – Dale Carnegie

If you’re a Scrum Master who strives to be amazing at what you do, I highly recommend picking up these three books. Make reading these a part of your New Year’s resolution. You’ll thank me later.

 

 

The Importance of Making Priorities Transparent

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Au Cheval Burger

This Tuesday our Responsive Advisors team visited Au Cheval, a popular burger restaurant in Chicago. In April of 2016, I visited Au Cheval for the first time with Robb, and I wrote this blog post about it on my personal blog. I thought this post was worth sharing in honor of our first team visit to Au Cheval!

A couple weeks ago I did some work in Chicago with Robb, and we decided to try grabbing dinner at Au Cheval, a popular burger joint. I said try because Au Cheval can have wait times longer than three hours due to being declared as having the best burger in America. We were hungry and had other work to do, so we obviously didn’t want to wait three hours to get food. We figured that if we got to the restaurant and found out that the wait time was too long, we could just grab food from somewhere else.

When we arrived, there was a line coming out of the small, crowded building. People were waiting on a bench outside. The likelihood of getting seated quickly didn’t look good. We got in line anyways, and within a few minutes Robb was able to talk to a waitress and found out that the wait to be seated was about an hour and a half. Fortunately, two spots at the bar had just opened up, and we were able to leapfrog the line.

So what do burgers in Chicago have anything to do with the transparency of priorities?

If Robb and I had found out that we needed to wait more than an hour to get food at Au Cheval, it would have affected our decision to eat there. If the waitress had told us it would take an hour to get seated, but it had actually taken two hours, we would have been beyond hangry. If Au Cheval would not have had any idea how long it would have taken for us to get seated, we would have just left. But it turned out that there was less demand for the seats at the bar than tables, so we got seated right away and started eating delicious hamburgers within thirty minutes.

This same principle applies to priorities. Customers, whether they are internal or external to your organization, cannot make informed decisions if they do not know where their requests sit on your backlog. If customer requests go into a wormhole and they magically come out sometime in the future (or never), customers will not be able to make decisions like deciding whether they should wait on your services, do it themselves, or outsource the request to someone else.

Not giving customers visibility into priorities can cause many problems. More passive (and sneaky) customers will often solve the problem themselves. At this point, you might be thinking, “Great! That means fewer problems for my team to solve,” but it actually leads to shadow IT, which is typically considered a bad thing.

In the absence of transparent priorities, more aggressive customers resort to yelling or doing whatever they have to in order to ensure their work items are the top priority. If this starts happening, it means the organization is essentially being driven by angry, emotional customers. I don’t think I need to explain why that’s a bad thing.

The solution to making priorities transparent lies within how you structure priorities within your organization. However, there are lots of techniques for prioritization in an agile environment, and there are many factors that determine which techniques might work in your context. If you want to learn practices that can help with prioritization, check out our Professional Scrum Product Owner training. Plus if you attend one of our many scheduled courses in Chicago, you can visit Au Cheval! It’s within walking distance of our office!

And by the way, the burgers at Au Cheval were amazing. If you ever go there, order the bacon with your burger. You will not be disappointed.

Tactical or Strategic? Two Agile Transformation Paths

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Leaders seeking agile transformations often have the daunting task of shifting entire cultural and organizational changes necessary to stay relevant and ahead of the competition. Change does not occur overnight and utilizing Agile frameworks make necessary transformations manageable and, more importantly, successful.

There are two general paths in which an organization will develop agile knowledge. I refer to these two approaches as the “tactical approach” and the “strategic approach” for agile development transformation. The tactical approach is what I describe as learning from a seasoned expert in the mentorship role, usually someone within the organization. The strategic approach is where an external trainer and/or coach is hired to help bring teams up to speed quickly and efficiently in the agile transformation. There are certainly benefits to both approaches as well as some challenges which I’ll explore more carefully.

Tactical: Delivery Based

The tactical approach is appealing due to its efficient use of an in-house agile expert who already understands the culture and structure of the organization. A seasoned software developer who is already a member of the delivery team and understands agile development practices is able to mentor and teach others to adapt in meaningful and relevant ways. This person is responsible for software development, releases, infrastructure recommendations, and the list goes on and on. If this is the person teaching Scrum or Kanban, it may appear on the surface that this approach provides the best of both worlds at a fraction of the price. However, I encourage you to look carefully at this option. One main disadvantage of to this approach is that player/coaches have two focuses: delivery and knowledge transfer. Under a hardpressed deadline, knowledge transfer will often suffer when delivery responsibilities take priority.

Strategic: Dedicated Trainer/Coach

A more strategic approach to transformation would entail a training class followed by a dedicated onsite coaching and advising. This approach has the benefit of focusing directly on learning and evaluating results through practice. For some, this approach appears more expensive with less direct results in the output. However, I would challenge a decision maker to look more holistically. A trainer or coach isn’t going to help deliver your critical project on time. However, they will help identify value, help you focus your money and people on that value stream, increase visibility, and improve end-to-end throughput while reducing expensive quality problems.

Best of Both Worlds

Imagine having a team of agile technology professionals who also understand the best of agile development practices. Now imagine them working with expert trainers, coaches, and advisors. This team formation makes the most drastic impact on how delivery is done within an organization.

Conclusion

Agile transformations are not easy and there are some common reasons they fail. Read my blog on Four Reasons Why Your Agile Implementation Isn’t Working for more on this topic.  I recommend the delivery-based approach with a dedicated trainer approach or a hybrid, both valid ways to approach an agile transformation.

If you’re looking for any of the above solutions to help your company make the transition, let’s talk. Our expert professionals do this all day every day. We can help.

Why and how I became an agile coach and trainer

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As an agile coach and trainer, I have had the opportunity to reach thousands of students that are just beginning their journey into the Scrum and agile world. Throughout the years, I was repeatedly asked by students how they can get a job being a Scrum Master or agile coach. The question has caused me to think back to how I got here in the first place. I could never have predicted I would be doing what I am today ten years ago.

The early days

My first experience with the agile world was back when I was a developer while finishing up an MBA attending classes at night. I started a new job as a developer at an investment bank that was supporting the Capital Markets business unit. The company had recently made a large investment to improve the entire IT department and I was part of the Application Development team. We started with whiteboards and spreadsheets which I found perplexing. I thought to myself, ‘Why use a whiteboard when we have computer tracking tools?’ Despite hearing, “This is the way it’s always been done,” it did not stop me from asking questions relentlessly to get to the root of why things were conducted the way they were.

I began seriously considering new career paths that would leverage my education and experience. So one day in a one-on-one meeting, I asked my manager how I could contribute in a way that complimented my learnings. It was at this moment, he introduced me to Scrum and sent me to my first Scrum class.

My first Scrum training

I have vivid memories of my very first Scrum training class. The training took place at a hotel located in a suburb outside of Milwaukee that offered a continental breakfast spread before the start of class. I remember also appreciating how we could place our sandwich orders for lunch in the dark wood modernly renovated hotel. Sitting at a roundtable with my team of novice Scrum Masters, we were immediately engaged in group activities that included Legos and paper mache. I admit I don’t remember much of the class except for the fact that I was convinced I could never be up there training a Scrum class for two full days. It seemed utterly intimidating. Looking back it’s super ironic given I teach Scrum now for a living.

After receiving my Professional Scrum Master certification, I went back to work convinced I could change the world one Scrum team at a time. To my dismay, I came back to a team that had very limited knowledge of Scrum and was not ready for my tenacity and passion. I quickly learned that my team had become accustomed to the elements of Kanban, and Scrum was a very foreign concept that no one seemed to want any part of. This forced me to research and learn all that I could about Kanban in order to be the best Scrum Master in a Kanban shop. One of the most valuable skills I learned was how to influence without authority, which is great because I had no authority whatsoever. At this point in time, I was still accustomed to a traditional management structure in which the manager made all the decisions and subordinates had no choice but to simply accept the decisions made. I figured if I just had some authority to make decisions and get people to do what I asked, I could get so much farther getting teams to adopt agile development practices.

The Search for the perfect job

I began looking for a new position soon after earning my MBA that would enable me to integrate all that I have learned from my MBA program and Scrum training. I eventually landed an interview with a Milwaukee-based consultancy for a product owner and development lead position in Chicago. After some discussion, one of my interviewers suggested I might be better suited for another role they had been trying to fill with some difficulty and eventually stopped posting. The position was for an agile consultant. They were looking for someone that had strong client-facing technical, business, and presentation skills. This person for them was hard to find until they met me. I didn’t realize what was happening as they quickly shifted the interview around and had me speak with the head of the agile department. Things escalated quickly and in the end, I was offered the position in which I accepted my new role as a professional agile consultant and trainer.

I basically fell into this career. I couldn’t have planned it. Little did I know, I had been preparing for the role of a lifetime for a decade. All that I learned in college coupled with my work experience helped me become the perfect candidate for a role in transforming organizations that had difficulty adapting quickly into highly performant agile machines. To this day, I love my job and remain passionate about getting better so I can help my clients get better.

Ready for anything

Since I could never have planned this path it’s hard for me to tell others how to get there too. I can tell you what I did, but that might not be what works for you. I can only suggest that you stay sharp, keep practicing, stay hungry, take chances, and one day the right opportunity will present itself and you will be well prepared to identify it and take advantage of it. A great place to start is with Jordan Job’s A Scrum Master’s reading list to gain as much knowledge about this exciting profession.  A favorite quote of mine by Louis Pasteur can be boiled down to, “chance favors the prepared mind” and thus, I always stay prepared for a chance.


Robert Pieper in his early days