So You Want To Be A Scrum Master ; 95tr

So You Want To Be A Scrum

Master?

Helen Lisowski, Rob Lambert, Martyn

Frank, Raji Bhamidipati, Steven

Mackenzie and Keith OSullivan

This book is for sale at http://leanpub.com/beascrummaster

This version was published on 2020-08-24

This is a Leanpub book. Leanpub empowers authors and

publishers with the Lean Publishing process. Lean

Publishing is the act of publishing an in-progress ebook

using lightweight tools and many iterations to get reader

feedback, pivot until you have the right book and build

traction once you do.

© 2016 - 2020 Helen Lisowski, Rob Lambert, Martyn Frank,

Raji Bhamidipati, Steven Mackenzie and Keith OSullivan

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Please help Helen Lisowski, Rob Lambert, Martyn Frank,

Raji Bhamidipati, Steven Mackenzie and Keith OSullivan by

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Dedicated to all those scrum masters out there, doing the

good work of agile.

Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

What to Tell Your Mum When She Asks What You

Do for a Living . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Scrum Master is a Strange Job Title (but we don’t

have a better one) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

How to Tell People What to Do Without Telling

Them What to Do . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

How Do You Become an Expert in a Room Full of

Experts? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

What Has a Scrum Master Ever Done for Us? . . . . . 19

You’re Not the Admin Lacky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Being Effective and Liked . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

New Team Members Adopt the Same Behaviours as

the Team . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

This is the Team to Get it Done . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Using Small Steps When Big Changes Might Be

Resisted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

CONTENTS

Why is Coffee Important? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

Being Flat Out Busy is Not Effective Agile . . . . . . . 43

The Framework Curse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

The Kind of Person Who Knew Too Much . . . . . . . 50

No Process is Perfect, but it Doesn’t Mean it’s Crap . 52

Poor Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

Reduce Failure Demand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

Inflicting Help . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

Agile Consultants Who Don’t Know What it Means

to Be Agile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

What Would a Customer Say if You Shipped it Now? 71

Whilst Doing This, You’re Not Doing That . . . . . . 73

Scrum Master - What Happens Next? . . . . . . . . . . 76

How We Learn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

Introduction

This book is the result of a Hackathon.

Whilst the Software Developers were busy hacking code, the

Agile Community Of Interest decided to hack around on a

book.

During that Hackathon, in 2016, we came together to write a

book in just 48 hours.

The result is this book you have here.

We appreciate your support and we really do hope you enjoy

the book. We certainly enjoyed creating it for you.

Thanks,

Rob Lambert et al

What to Tell Your Mum

When She Asks What

You Do for a Living

Thanks mum

We’ve all been there. Your family all get together and after

a couple of drinks someone looks across the top of their 3rd

glass of wine and asks: So what exactly IS it that you do?

What do you say?

This question is even tougher to answer if your family don’t

work in IT - they have no starting point on which you can

What to Tell Your Mum When She Asks What You Do for a Living 3

build out their knowledge.

Why is this question even

important?

Sooner or later you will need an answer for a manager or

senior executive who has never come across agile before. Or

perhaps, worse than that, they may have an inaccurate view

of what agile working is all about.

You will have around 2-3 minutes to make your case well.

You will need to be clear and succinct. You will need to take

someone from zero understanding, to a reasonable starting

place. In 2 minutes.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may we

remind you of ‘The Elevator Pitch’

The idea of an elevator pitch is common in the sales and

marketing worlds, and the concept is exactly what we need

here. Can you, in 2-3 minutes, convey the essence of what a

Scrum Master is or does to someone who has never heard of

one before?

One approach is to practice trying to convey this idea clearly

to your mum*. If you can help her, as a lay-person, to

understand, the same pitch will probably work for a CEO.

We need to start from the beginning. What we need is an

everyday analogy. It worth saying that there is no single

correct answer.