How to Become a Better Scrum Master - Agile Tour Beirut 2016 - Ben Linders

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How to Become a
Better Scrum Master Ben Linders

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Agile, Lean, Quality & Continuous Improvement
Trainer / Coach / Mentor / Writer / Presenter
Recognized Expert on Agile Retrospectives
CMMI & People-CMM Assessor
Freelance Editor for InfoQ.com
Ben Linders
Co-Author Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives
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Author: What Drives Quality & Continuous Improvement
eBook: Download from Amazon, InfoQ or Leanpub
Print: Buy on Amazon or other bookstores

More than Scrum

No one best way

What is Agile?

Being Agile (not: doing Agile)

Agile Manifesto
“We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it”

Agile Principles
None of the twelve agile principles mentions Scrum master
Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the
environment and support they need, and trust them to get the
job done.
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from
self-organizing teams.
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more
effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Scrum master role in Scrum Guide
The Scrum Master is responsible for
ensuring Scrum is understood and
enacted. Scrum Masters do this by ensuring
that the Scrum Team adheres to Scrum
theory, practices, and rules.
The Scrum Master is a servant-leader for
the Scrum Team. The Scrum Master helps
those outside the Scrum Team understand
which of their interactions with the
Scrum Team are helpful and which
aren’t. The Scrum Master helps everyone
change these interactions to maximize
the value created by the Scrum Team.

ScrumMaster in Scrum Primer
The ScrumMaster helps the product group learn and apply Scrum to
achieve business value. The ScrumMaster does whatever is in their
power to help the Team, Product Owner and organization be
successful.
The ScrumMaster is not the manager of the Team members, nor are
they a project manager, team lead, or team representative. Instead,
the ScrumMaster serves the Team; he or she helps to remove
impediments, protects the Team from outside interference, and helps
the Team to adopt modern development practices.
He or she educates, coaches and guides the Product Owner, Team
and the rest of the organization in the skillful use of Scrum. The
ScrumMaster is a coach and teacher. The ScrumMaster makes sure
everyone (including the Product Owner, and those in management)
understands the principles and practices of Scrum, and they help lead
the organization through the often difficult change required to
achieve success with agile development.
Since Scrum makes visible many impediments and threats to the
Team’s and Product Owner’s effectiveness, it is important to have an
engaged ScrumMaster working energetically to help resolve
those issues, or the Team or Product Owner will find it difficult to
succeed.

What do you do as a Scrum master?

Scrum master = Superman?
• Assure Scrum is understood
• Team adheres
• Servant leader
• Help stakeholders to collaborate
with team
• Help people interact
• Maximize value
• Motivated individuals
• Establish trust
• Constant pace
• Self-organizing team
• Team adopts to change

Are Scrum masters needed?

Successful Scrum masters
Lead
Connect
Improve

Lead

Don’t manage, lead!

Get the best out of people

Which leadership style / approiach
do you use as Scrummaster?

Servant leadership
As a servant leader, you're a "servant first" – you focus on the needs of
others, especially team members, before you consider your own. You
acknowledge other people's perspectives, give them the support they
need to meet their work and personal goals, involve them in decisions
where appropriate, and build a sense of community within your team.
This leads to higher engagement, more trust, and stronger
relationships with team members and other stakeholders. From
mindtools.com
What do you look for in a servant leader?
7 secrets of servant leadership

Leadership Styles
• Situational leadership
• Autocratic
• Paternalistic
• Democratic
• Intent-based
• Holacracy
• Sociocracy
• Host leadership Effective Leadership
• Servant leadership for Scrum masters
• Reinventing organizations
• Management 3.0 and managing for happiness

Follow the leader?

When the Scrum master is away …

Connect

Collaboration matters
Team <–> PO
Team <-> customers
PO <-> customers
Inside Team
Scrum master <-> …
Collaboration is key
for succes with agile

Decreasing distance
Colocated teams
• Teambuilding
• Collaboration Time (stand-up, sprint review,
retrospective)
• Pairing
• Build relationships
Remote teams
Same as colocated, plus:
• Emotional distance
• Travel & meet face 2 face

Create a culture of safety
Check safety in retrospectives,
stand-up, day-to-day work, etc.
• Prime directive
• Exercises:
– One Word
– Constellation
– Team Kudos
When safety is low
Deal with safety, make sure problems are raised!

Effective agile meetings
• Know the Why
• Right audience
• Focus
• Time-boxing
• Facilitation

Dealing with Impediments
Make it visible
Raise issues early
Feelings matter
Why over How
Know the root causes
Safe-to-fail experiments
Handling Impediments

Improve

Follow the rules?

Embedded Improvement
Agile values, principles, practices, and methods
support continuous improvement
• Frequently Inspect and Adapt
• Scrum master, focus on process
• Stand-up, deal with impediments
• Agile Retrospectives
• Coaching & Mentoring

How do you coach as a Scrum master?

This isn’t coaching

This isn’t coaching either

Agile Coaching
Help people to find and do improvements
 Give Feedback
 Provide Ideas
 Inspire People
 Make it happen
Agile Needs Coaching
Develop Coaching Skills

Change doing change
• Don’t change people
• Start with “why”
• Offer help
• Environment for change
• Be an example
• Be there

Look and Listen

Know thy strengths
Project that succeeded
• Learn from things that go well
• People and team strengths
• Exploit to improve
Learn from success
Solution focused retro
Identify strengths, apply them to solve problems

Agile Retrospectives
Practice for teams to reflect on their way of working
and to continuously become better in what they do.
Focus upon
• Teamworking
• Self organizing
What is an Agile Retrospectives

No blaming or complaining

Focus on the vital few actions
Small but significant continuous improvements
• Actions for the next iteration
• Destroy actions to focus:
– Dot voting
– Remove bottleneck
– Devil’s and Angel’s advocate
– Kill actions Vital Few Actions
• Enable teams to improve
Focus to assure that vital few actions get done!

Experiment

Become a Better Scrum master
Every journey for agility and
continuous improvement
starts with a first agile step

And don’t forget …

Questions?Questions?
Ben Linders
Independent Consultant Agile, Lean,
Quality & Continuous Improvement
info@BenLinders.cominfo@BenLinders.com
@BenLinders
www.linkedin.com/in/benlinderswww.linkedin.com/in/benlinders
www.facebook.com/BenLindersAdvieswww.facebook.com/BenLindersAdvies
www.benlinders.comwww.benlinders.com

Background Information

Assigning the Scrum master role
• Technical or organizational? Both!
• Part time or full time? Depends
• Fixed or rotating? Mostly fixed
Dedicated full time Scrum masters are hard to implement
Rotating Scrum masters in teams
Let the Scrum master come from the team

Effective Scrum master practices
• Keep the goals in mind, why over how
• Pull in actions from the retrospective
• Balance between doing it yourself vs helping others
• Encourage collaboration
• Be an example
What is success for a Scrum master?

Scrum master skills
• Tech leading
• Coaching
• Communication
• System view
“soft skills” for working with technical and business people

Golden Rules for Improvement
• Dare to share, early and frequently
• Result depends on team, not individuals
• The one who checks out a task is not necessarily
the one who has to finish it
• The one’s working on a task are the right people
• You may critique anything,
but never criticize anyone
BenLinders.com/GoldenRules

Getting More out of Agile & Lean
Practices for teams and stakeholders to develop the right
products, deliver faster, increase quality, and create
happy high performing teams.
Full Day Workshop:
Deploying practices effectively
Improve Collaboration
Tips & Trick for Agile & Lean
Improve Continuously
Increase your organization's agility!
BenLinders.com/agilelean

Retrospectives Book
Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives
By Luis Gonçalves & Ben Linders
Download from InfoQ or Leanpub
Buy on Amazon or Lulu
amazon.com/dp/B00SWJO1DI
leanpub.com/gettingvalueoutofagileretrospectives
Mailinglist: eepurl.com/Mem7H

Retrospectives Book Bundle
Six successful retrospectives books
• Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives
• Fun Retrospectives
• Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your Retrospectives
• The Retrospective Handbook
• Retrospectives for Organizational Change
• The Retrospectives Kickstarter
These books will make your agile retrospectives rock!
Teams will love to do them :-).
leanpub.com/b/agileretrospectives
Discounted price: $30,48 (excl. VAT)

Agile Retrospectives
amazon.com/dp/B00SWJO1DI benlinders.com/exercises/

Continuous Improvement
Become aware of importance of
continuous improvement,
Explore how it’s engrained in agile
software development
Suggestions that you can use in your
daily work to improve continuously
Increase your organization's agility!
Leanpub.com/continuousimprovement
“Continuous Improvement is the act of continuously doing
whatever helps to become better and thus more valuable”

Assessing your Agility
Over 40 tools:
• Self-Assessment checklists
• Readyness checks
• Maturity assessments
• Agile health checks
• Measurements
• And much more!
Agile Self-Assessments

Articles on Effective Agile
• Self-assessing how Agile you are
• Sustainable Improvement through Agile Retrospectives
• Working in a Sustainable Pace
• Becoming Agile and Lean
• Succes Factors for Using Scrum and Getting Benefits
• Process Improvement: The Agile Way
• Golden Rules for Agile Process Improvement
• How to deal with Resistance when Implementing Agile
• Managing Projects with Agile Teams
• Agile Project Management
• Establishing and Maintaining Stable Teams
• Getting Business Value out of Agile Retrospectives
• Sharing Knowledge is Power
• Are your Professionals Empowered?

How to Become a Better Scrum Master - Agile Tour Beirut 2016 - Ben Linders

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