Pasco Duarte (5:41)

The Tuesday episode. Yeah, yeah. Yesterday's episode.

Season Hughes (5:44)

You should listen to Monday and Tuesday, But Tuesday's episode where we go back to the Scrum Guide. If you can get as many people into training to understand the foundation of SCRUM in its pure form, that will set them up for being able to implement it in a healthy way. And not what we talked about of that Scrum butt or the basketball game where people are wearing different jerseys. Like, we're okay. We're all here at all levels. We're all aligned on what we're going to do. And in this particular engagement, everybody, including the leaders, got the foundational training of Scrum, which is the Certified Scrum Master Workshop. I think that if you're going to send people to a certification or a SCRUM training. That or I've heard good things about PSM Level one as well. Getting them that foundation. As a Scrum master who needs to really understand the guide and to be able to coach people on it, I usually start there. And then with the product owners, we also offered a lot of them already had their CSPO for any that didn't. We got them that training and we also developed a course that was our ACSPO Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner certification that they took as well. So that's where we started was with that foundation. That's the first thing that I love to do because there are so many aha moments that we see and especially if you can get that as just your department or your company, hearing the questions that get asked or hearing the improvements and the ideas or that like, oh, we were doing it this way, we should do it this way. I love being able to kind of be in those private trainings, whether I'm giving them or I'm a participant. Love that. And then after that, we did Liftoffs, which is time to shout out another book. Something to put in your toolbox is a book called Liftoffs that I've been doing this now for seven years almost, and I still go back to that book all the time. They're one of my favorite things to do with the teams. And this is where you can take a full day with the team or a half day if that's all you can get. And you just talk about forming a team like we talked about on Team Tuesday, like an actual team of why are we here? Who are the people involved? What is our vision? How do we contribute to that vision? What skills does the team need? From just an execution standpoint, we'll actually go through kind of a skills matrix exercise of maybe this team needs front end development, back end development, manual testing, automated testing. What do we have? What do we not have? What are people willing to learn? We also talk about how we will work together. So we create working agreements, another great thing in your toolbox. And then we go through like a backlog formation of what is the work that we need to do. Let's write stories for it, let's start prioritizing them. It's a lot of planning and it's a lot of people. And here's where it can be hard sometimes not in this organization. They're like, yeah, do what you need to do. Oh, my gosh, it was just the best and a very rare engagement as an agile coach or when I was stepping in and helping them with Their Scrum Masters is take all the time you need, do whatever you need. But sometimes it can be very hard to sell to leadership. We are going to take some time away from execution to start planning as people and a team. So something I try to do that's worked for me. Another sneaky toolbox thing is I may go to leaders and say, okay, with this team, we're going to take a full day to really do some team formation. We are going to take a look at the skills we need for execution and they'll go, oh my gosh, no, we can't do a full day. Like, that's too much. We need to get to work. Oh, okay. If we can't do a full day, half day, four hours, okay, that's better, we can do that. So that's a little bit more sneaky. But just to be, I think, a good Scrum Master, what you need to do is to at least know how to do everybody's accountability on the team. And this, if it is something you want to pursue being an agile coach in later, it's about seeing once you've gone through this change, how are the accountabilities and processes being executed and maybe where are the opportunities for improvement. There's usually room for improvement in all three Scrum Master developer, product Owner but what I saw in this particular engagement was Scrum Masters were being put into a role of technical analysts. Like the proposed title for them was actually Technical Scrum Masters. And I saw them taking on roles that I would expect developers to be doing on the team. So things like writing and understanding requirements, for example, like they were very, very technical and acting as technical advisors, which meant that the product owners were the ones coming in and managing stakeholders and expectations and what it looks like to interact with the team. In Scrum, they were checking in on people who were needing a bit more like coaching and handholding, like they were doing that coaching. So they were stepping into that role. While developers were kind of hands off with the work, daily Scrums were status updates. So we saw opportunities there to free up Scrum Masters to really focus on the people and the processes. So just taking a step back, what I like to do in any kind of change is get a shared understanding, get some kind of team working agreements or formation and then to actually watch the teams go and see what happens and then regroup with them and the leaders and just say, here's what I'm seeing, maybe here are some proposed solutions, but mostly just here's what I'm observing and change is really hard, too. It's really hard.

Pasco Duarte (12:29)

And one of the things that I usually say is that it's not that it's just hard. It is hard. Plus it requires support. Right. Like one of the things you said also on Tuesday, you need to know the Scrum Guide. Well, we can't expect all the team members to know the Scrum Guide because it's not their focus. Right. So we need to help them with that. Right. We need to be present. And I think it's important to recognize that last aspect that you mentioned is very important, which is to, at regular intervals, regroup, figure out where we are and what could be the next step to take.

Season Hughes (13:04)

Exactly. Patterns that I see over and over again are, we're going to do Scrum now. Okay, go. Like what? Like what? There's no understanding of what Scrum is or why we're doing it. A small common example is they will go. They being the organization or leadership, will go to product managers and just say, okay, you're a product owner now. But they have no training or support or understanding of the expectations of. This means that you are going to prioritize the backlog. Just. I see that a lot, that kind of lack of support, and I don't. There's good intentions and there's enthusiasm around these kinds of changes, but the support and execution can be lacking. And as a Scrum Master, you can come in and hopefully be listened to, or sometimes it's no, just go with the program. We don't have time for training. Make it work. I hear that a lot as a Scrum Master, and that's. That's unfortunate.

Pasco Duarte (14:13)

This was wonderful. Thank you for sharing all of those tips and ideas with us. Susan.

Season Hughes (14:18)

You're welcome. And that thank you to that organization and those leaders for just being a good example of change and support. That was awesome.

Pasco Duarte (14:30)

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