Coach’s Corner

Becoming a professional Scrum master is a lifelong journey. We’ve explored the many skills the Scrum master uses during their day-to-day work. You can spend years improving your coaching, mentoring, training, and facilitation skills. So where do you start?

Start with The Scrum Guide. It’s under 20 pages, but it contains everything you need to know in order to understand and start with Scrum. Read The Scrum Guide once a month and take a few minutes to write about an aspect of the guide that stood out to you. Set a calendar invite so you don’t forget!

As you write, explore how the relationships between the various roles impact Scrum. How do the Scrum values apply to each role? What could happen if you as a person play the roles of both Scrum master and product owner? Does Scrum even allow one person to play two roles?

Consider the Scrum artifacts and how each Scrum event offers an opportunity to implement the three pillars of empiricism (inspection, adaptation, and transparency) to one of them. For example, say your team is working on a website for a company that sells furniture. During a sprint review, the increment you’re inspecting includes new search features for users, and the product owner discusses a new shipping feature a competitor just launched. Full transparency is on display as the stakeholders and Scrum team discuss what to do next and the challenges they may face in doing it. The outcome is an adapted product backlog that contains a new product backlog item to implement the same feature the competitor has developed.

Switching gears from this hypothetical scenario back to your real-life situation, think about what’s inhibiting the optimization of the three pillars of empiricism to the Scrum artifacts in your current situation. How can you change that?

Many of the topics and patterns we discuss in this book started as observations we made while performing this exercise. Over time, you’ll notice the way you think about and describe Scrum becomes more concise.

During your monthly reflection on The Scrum Guide, you can also inspect your beliefs about Scrum and make corrections where they’ve gone off track. For example, some Scrum masters train teams to use a Definition of Ready for product backlog items. We’ll explore this idea in the Product Backlog chapter, but the point here is that the definition of ready isn’t part of the Scrum framework. That definition-of-ready practice could be helpful to your team, but The Scrum Guide handles “ready’’ in a different way.

In the next chapter we’ll discuss management. While management isn’t mentioned in The Scrum Guide, working with multiple levels of management is essential to adopting Scrum. We’ll explore:

• Management’s role with a Scrum team
• How to work with managers who are new to Scrum
• What managers typically need from the Scrum team
• What Scrum teams need from managers

Understanding management’s role on a Scrum team and how managers can add to a Scrum team’s success will help guide your coaching efforts and give your teams a better chance of success. See you there!