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Contribution by Dan Greenberg Material Taken From… https://www.knowledgehut.com/blog/agile/5-hurdles-that-scrum-masters-commonly-face Managing Role Expectations The Scrum Master role can be confused with a Project Manager but in reality the two are not related at all. A Scrum Master is a facilitator and a servant leader, whose role on the team is to champion continuous improvement and protect the team from distraction so it can focus on the work. A Scrum Master is NOT a reporter of status, a manager, nor a producer of metrics. Resistance to Change Many teams develop transformation fatigue. We’ve been working together for 20 years and every few months some new corporate initiative comes down but because nothing ever really changes, it becomes like the boy who cried wolf. Now Agile is the hot new flavor of the month, but I’ve been through dozens of flavors of the month over the years and if you just wait it out, pretty soon it will be gone and a new one will take its p...

Guest contributor: Scrum Master Dan-o I’m working with a team now where code commits literally take years to get to production. Why such a long delay? Months and months of repetitive testing and security checks by numerous teams, departments, outside organizations, ad nauseam - essentially years’ worth of bureaucratic red tape. I’m not of the opinion that bureaucracy is inherently evil but I do think it is a misguided attempt to solve a legitimate problem. In actuality, I think it winds up being a self-fulfilling prophecy guaranteed to justify its own existence. Typically, what I’ve seen happen is you have a team deploy say, 100 features to production and one of them has a defect. Rather than do a root cause analysis, management wants assurance that no defect ever makes it to production again so they force EVERY feature to go through an intense series of gates. Developers then, knowing that the robust system of checks will catch any defect (and often getting pressured by manageme...

Today's posting is from guest blogger Dan Greenberg... I just came from a daily scrum where a team complained about having to create a PowerPoint deck for an upcoming demo to a group that would not include stakeholders. When I asked who the right people to be in the room for a demo would be, they listed two stakeholders whose feedback they really wanted to get. My suggestion: transparency! Write a user story for the creation of the PowerPoint slides required for the “required” demo and include this work in the team’s capacity, potentially knocking other valuable work into a future sprint. Hold a true demo to get the valuable feedback from the real stakeholders in addition to the “required” one. Go to the manager requiring the demo and show them the valuable work that had to be delayed because of the effort to create the PowerPoint deck. Show the two calendar events and be up front about the double booking of the team’s time to hold two demos rather than one. Stress ...

Daniel Pink (renown author of "Drive" - and the surprising truth about what motivates us  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc  where we learned that throwing money at people doesn't help, autonomy, mastery and purpose do)... He has recently shifted his focus to the importance of timing, including a book called "When".  An interesting data/fact/research driven conclusion is that people are highly effected by temporal events like in 'mid life crisis' or running more marathons at 29, 39 or 49 years old are motivated by midpoints and endpoints. Having short sprints in Scrum (say 2 weeks) forces people to focus and prioritize on delivery, not on some unattainable long term obscure vision, but a concrete step in the right direction of accomplishing that vision. Scrum, once again, leverages human strength and has 'built in' to the system behavior that leverages human strength, not human weakness.  The more research emerges about how h...

Harvard Business Review in its article "An Exercise to Help Your Team Feel More Comfortable with Conflict" , discussed the idea of "conflict debt" and how it can harm your team or organization... Rather than working through the conflicts that will help our organizations move forward, we duck, dodge, and defer them.  The result is that most of us find our teams up to our eyeballs in conflict debt .  Conflict debt is the sum of all undiscussed and unresolved issues that stand in the way of progress. Conflict debt can be as minor as withholding the constructive feedback that would allow your colleague to do a better job and as profound as continually deferring the strategic decision about when to scale your new product line. Paying down the conflict debt on your team is critical, but it won’t be easy.  The problem is that your team likely lacks both the skills and the mindset to use conflict productively.  One reason for that is that we’re biol...

I recall being very surprised when working at Disney, and the criteria they recommended we use for hiring decisions. Disney had very specific recommendations, the strangest of which was that passion/enthusiasm for the brand (commonly called being 'pixie dusted' at Disney) was the MOST important qualification for applicants. In Agile, I have seen highly skilled teams with amazingly smart subject matter experts struggle while seeing teams who are highly motivated - enthusiastic neo-Agilists with much less subject matter expertise - quickly surpass the teams of subject matter experts and leave them far behind in a very short time. https://www.fastcompany.com/1837853/8-rules-creating-passionate-work-culture Fast Company magazine's "8 Rules for Creating Passionate Work Culture" includes the quote:  "Hire for passion first, experience second and credentials third". Quite different from the standard HR protocol, but who would you rather w...

Harvard Business Review conducted a 15-year longitudinal study and concluded: 54% of the companies they observed suffered a material drop in trust At a cost of at LEAST $180 billion and  At least 2% index score drop . What are the four main causes of lack of trust that creates a 'lying organization'? Weak cross-functional collaboration:    Silos cause almost a 6x increase in withholding or distorting of information. No effective process to gather decision makers into honest conversations about tough issues .  Organizations have to rely on rumors and gossip.  Interestingly, those types of companies found 71% of meetings to be unproductive Unjust Accountability Systems:    Organizations are 377% more likely to withhold or distort info if employee contribution measurement is seen as unfair. Lack of Strategic Clarity:   Employees are 283% more likely to withhold or distort the truth when there isn't clear alignment about what com...