Thursday, November 24, 2011

Preparing for the new job

Even though I have been giving many trainings in lean, agile and scrum - its a different story to actually become a SM. Anyway, team members might wonder what a SM is doing the whole day and JIT, Ismo tweeted this link: 
42 tasks for a scrum master
http://agiletrail.com/2011/11/14/42-tasks-for-a-scrum-masters-job/
a good start for me :)

Strangely the default seems to be that a SM is not a full-time job and I witnessed various set-ups and consulted some organizations: I found the following combinations with pros and cons:
PO = Product Owner, LM = Line Manager

1 comment:

  1. Wolfi, you list "no additional headcount" as a pro and "additional headcount" as a con.

    "additional headcount" is not a con, neither a pro. It either makes sense economically or not. Coaching or facilitation _should_ make sense economically.
    That is, eg, if you have a cross-functional team of say 6 people, with no coach. and you have an option to get one more guy, a developer, tester, UX expert, whatever expertise the team needs most. or you have an option to get a team coach, or scrum master or some "agile" master. which one makes the team perform better? You should take that option.

    Of course some of the benefits of a team coach are visible after a long term. Anyway, the best is to ask the team after some time if coauching made sense.

    Once I worked with a team, whom "sacrificed" one half of a tester guy to become a half-time Scrum Master. After a while we asked the team, whether they are doing better now, with a 1/2 tester less and 1/2 ScM more. They unanimously said they are doing better now. Then the "headcount" makes sense.

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