← Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Breaking Free from Zombie Scrum | Stuart Tipples
00:15:14
Stuart Tipples: From Zombie Scrum to Agile Thinking—Learning from a Failed Transformation Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: . ...
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- [00:04]
Vasko
Hey there, agile adventurer, just a quick question. What if for the price of a fancy coffee or half a pizza, you could unlock over 700 hours of the best agile content on the planet? That's audio, video, E courses, books, presentations, all that you can think of. But you can also join live calls with world class practitioners and hang out in a flame war free and AI slop clean slack with the sharpest minds in the game. Oh, and yes, you get direct access to me, Vasko, your Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. No, this is not a drill. It's this Scrum Master Toolbox membership. And it's your unfair advantage in the agile world. So if you want to know more, go check out scrummastertoolbox.org membership, that's scrummastertoolbox.org Membership. And check out all the goodies we have for you. Do it now. But if you're not doing it now, let's listen to the podcast.
- [01:12]
Podcast Host
Hello everybody. Welcome to one more week of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast. And this week, joining us from beautiful and I hear rainy uk is Stuart Tipples. Hey Stuart, welcome to the show.
- [01:23]
Stuart Tipples
Hey Vasco. Hey Vasco, thanks for asking me.
- [01:26]
Podcast Host
Absolutely. So Stuart is what he calls an agilista, a coach, a Scrum Master agile delivery, but also agile husband, dog, dad, and a Star wars nerd positive disruptor. And he's also passionate about helping teams and individuals build and ship awesome products to their customer. You can also follow Stuart Eddy's blog, urebelscrum.com the link is in the show notes, so make sure you check it out.
- [01:53]
Vasko
So Stuart, that was a short intro.
- [01:55]
Podcast Host
Tell us a little bit more about yourself and how did you end up becoming a Scrum Master?
- [02:01]
Stuart Tipples
Yeah, so how did I become a Scrum Master? I think I follow the pattern of many fellow Scrum Masters in that I kind of fell into it. I'll say face first, right? I'll say I was looking forward. More truthfully, I probably fell into an ass first if I'm honest. But like many of my colleagues and Scrum Masters that I talk to in my broad network, I followed quite a recognizable path. I had spent many years in project management, sort of more traditional waterfall sort of methodology, and was kind of autopiling it on a. If I'm honest, it can become very static in its approach. And there was a shift in British Telecom where I spent sort of many years of my sort of professional life and there was a shift towards trying to, to adopt a more agile way of working. It was limited to Quite a small area. It was predominantly the digital arm of BT that was interested in it, but it was very much, literally a chat with my boss. And it was almost as straightforward as, right, you're a Scrum Master now and this is how we're working, right? Zero preparation. I mean, in fairness, to put me through the CSM course. But again, as you know, as everybody watching this knows, that sort of two to three days is great, but by no means is it basic training for the real world that you're about to sort of go into, right? So I did again, what I think a lot of us do, right? I googled it. I did a lot of reading, I found a few good books and I started to try and reach out and build a network and talk to people and, you know, I tread water for a bit. I failed spectacularly very early on.
- [03:52]
Podcast Host
We'll talk about one of those in a second.
- [03:56]
Stuart Tipples
But I survived and eventually I got to a point where, dare I say, I think I eventually thrived. Right? And this has become something that I'm super passionate about and sort of love.
- [04:09]
Podcast Host
To hear that passion. Stuart, when you were doing that research, like, what are one or two resources that you would say, oh, that really helped me during my, let's say, sync or swim experience with Scrum Mastering.
- [04:24]
Stuart Tipples
So it's really interesting, right, because I think now, I think it's much better for new Scrum Masters find it, because there are podcasts like your own, there are many more sort of blogs, I mean, even just spending a bit on LinkedIn now, right? There are so many people that are sharing really good learning. Truthfully, back then, it wasn't great. There were a few sort of ebooks of varying quality. I think where I really benefited was, was throwing myself into LinkedIn and growing that network and finding that sort of network of Scrum Masters that were kind enough to sort of share a bit of their wisdom and share their bit of their experience. And I try and do the same now with my blog and with a lot of the sort of the content I sort of post and share.
- [05:12]
Podcast Host
So I'm going to put it out there that we have a cozy and friendly community here on the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. So if you're interested, just DM me on LinkedIn will get you into the slack and start having a conversation without those templated AI slop posts that we're seeing all the time now on LinkedIn. All right? But we're talking about real people here, and you are the person we are learning from today, Stuart. So of course, today's Monday, so explore one of those Fail Monday stories, obviously. So tell us a little bit about the context, what you were doing kind of company, what kind of context, the team size and so on. But what happened, like, walk us through those, let's say, those preluding steps, the conversations, the events that happen before you actually discovered that you had committed a failure.
- [06:07]
Stuart Tipples
So I think for this example, because, you know, certainly from my early days, there's many that I could, that I could draw from. Right. But I think what was interesting about this particular example was that from the surface and on the face of things, everything seemed fine. I mean, it was literally the meme, right? It was the dog sat in the room with the burning background, right? That's where I was at. So I'd been asked to join a team. They were newish, they had a Scrum master that had moved on. So like I joined and they kind of had Scrum down, right? You know, they were using Jira. We had Jira tickets. The tickets made reasonable sense. The Agile events were taking place. They were even having their retrospectives, which is, we all know that that's the first thing to sort of go in the bin when teams feel pressure. So on the face of it, it really seemed fine. So my work at the time, I thought, well, I just need to tighten this up. I'll inject a bit of life, try and inject a bit of passion, a bit of humor and sort of get these guys sort of enjoying sort of coming together as a team, which was the bit that I felt that was lacking. What I discovered, the more time I spent with these guys was that we were doing what I sort of call that sort of that. It's that Agile cosplay, right? It's that performative theater. We, as a team, we're doing the Agile events, right? Like, we'll hold them, they're there. You know, we have in the daily syncs, we've got the reviews, you know, occasionally stakeholders are showing up and giving feedback like it's all happening. But the more time I spent with them and the more time that I sort of started to get embedded into that team, I kind of noticed first of all, this team is nothing more than a feature factory, right? They are getting fully formed requirements given to them. It's essentially, go away and build that. They're literally being treated like a sausage machine, just churning out sort of features. Nobody was questioning it either. So there's none of this, is this the right thing? Does this offer the right value? It was that sort of automated sort of zombie Scrum. What I guess the lesson that I took away from this is, and it took me a while to get to because I kind of let them down. I noticed it a bit too late and it was really difficult to sort of resolve. We did kind of resolve it, but it was less than ideal because there was a personnel change, people shifted in and out of the team. So it was almost like we were restarting anyway because we sort of had to sort of swap out a few of the sort of the key players. But I guess my big takeaway from that and one that I took away to every other team I worked with, Agile isn't what you do, it's how you and the team think. So don't. Scrum is great. It's a brilliant lightwork framework and I am going to shout its sort of benefits from the rooftops, but it's not enough in this situation. No amount of Scrum is going to rescue this team. It's about understanding the right mindset. It's about understanding how people are thinking, how people are feeling. Because essentially, as I say, it was just very expensive, performative theater.
- [09:35]
Podcast Host
When you think about that story and probably similar stories that you've witnessed since then, what is the kind of actionable advice you have for us, right? Like for Luke, our faithful Scrum master out there, probably struggling with this very same situation right now. What could Luke do in order to figure out what the next step might be and potentially unblock the situation?
- [10:01]
Stuart Tipples
I think, and this was kind of my approach and it can seem a bit counterintuitive, but my guidance is ditch the rule book, right? The Scrum, whatever sort of framework you're using, it's there as a guardrail, right? It's the people that you need to spend the time with. It's building the team. It's understanding what motivates them individually. It's about understanding what motivates them collectively. If I could do that team again, the amount of effort I put into making sure that we were running super slick, that we were running Scrum by the book, throw it out the window. And ultimately that's kind of what I did. Once we had the new players in, I spent proportionately, probably 20% amount of my time was on the framework and 80% of my time with that team was around coaching sort of values and principles and getting the right mindset in place. The, the Agile events, the agile rituals, however we want to refer to them. It's enough that it can be just a super light guardrail. Now, ultimately you have to know the rules before you can break them. So as a Scrum Master, make sure that you know you are confident doing that. But yeah, as counterintuitive, throw the rulebook out the window, focus on people. People are messy, chaotic. And it's really. A framework is not going to fix individuals. Right. It's not even a sticky plaster on them. Right. You need to sort of those human relationships and lean into that sort of coding element of your role as a.
- [11:33]
Podcast Host
Scrum Master and be the supporting element for the team to break the rules. Right. Because they can't just break the rules because of course they'll be criticized for it. But if we help them through the process, maybe do small experiments, change some small things. For example, invite the product owner to present what they're working on during the sprint so that they know what's coming up and give some feedback before the quote unquote requirements are fully formed and so on and so forth. There are many small things we can do that help to get out of the. You called it zombie Scrum. I think that's a great term.
- [12:08]
Stuart Tipples
Yeah, yeah, totally. And look, it's again, it's about, it really leans hard into sort of Scrum Master, a servant leader as well. Right. Because you have to display the qualities that you want your team to emulate, which means you do have to sort of show courage to sort of stand up to the status quo and sort of say, look, we're not, we're not going to do that. We're not focusing on that right now. That, that'll, that'll come after.
- [12:31]
Podcast Host
Absolutely.
- [12:32]
Stuart Tipples
And you know, there's a whole deep discussion here around trust, you know, how you build your credibility. But that's a different question. Right?
- [12:43]
Podcast Host
That might be a different. Exactly. A different episode. Yeah, but, but for this day. Stuart, thank you very much for sharing that story.
- [12:52]
Stuart Tipples
No worries.
- [12:56]
Vasko
Alright, I hope you liked this episode, but before you hit next episode, here's the deal. This podcast is powered by people like you, the members who wanted more than just inspiration. They wanted real tools and real connection to people who are practicing agile every day. We're talking accident to over 700 hours of agile gold, CTO level strategy talks, Summit keynotes, live workshops, E courses, deep dive interviews, books, and if you're into no estimates, we got the pioneers of no estimates in those Deep Dive interviews as well. Agile Business intelligence, creating product visions, coaching your product, product owner courses, you name it. You'll get invites to monthly live Q&As with agile pioneers and practitioners, plus a private Slack community, which is free of all of that AI slop you see everywhere. And of course, without the flame wars. It's a community of practitioners that want to learn and thrive together. The best place to connect with community and learn together. So if this podcast has helped you before, imagine what you will get from this podcast membership. So head on over to scrummastertoolbox.org membership and join the community that's shaping the future of Agile. We have so much for you, so check out all the details at point. Some scrummastertoolbox.org membership because listening is great, it's important. But doing it together, that's next level. I'll see you in the community. Slack.
- [14:48]
Podcast Host
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