Advanced Agile & Scrum for Scrum Masters & POs

You're already practicing Scrum.
Maybe you've been doing it for a while, but you feel like you can take your team to the next level.
As you try to move to the next level of mastery, it's important to stay grounded in the fundamentals.
 

While the team is the heart of scrum, the product owner and the scrum master roles are essential to keeping the team moving in the right direction in the right way.
Really, the product owner is responsible for the direction the team is heading.
The PO owns the relationship with the stakeholders.
 

Given the focus of the product owner on the product, and scrum master on the team, it makes sense that they could naturally fall into opposition or conflict.
The product owner has been given this team to deliver their product vision.
In agile, and scrum, we've told the POs that they can have this team for a specific period of time; those are their constraints.
 

is the tight rope walker between the business and the team.

Every product for sale today, anywhere, started as an idea.
That idea then evolved into a vision that an organization got behind.
The same is true for projects.

Once the product vision is established it's time to figure out how the product will be delivered.
When looking at a vision, it can be overwhelming to imagine all that work, and how to get it done.
Instead of looking at the whole thing all at once, in Scrum, we use specific tools to start breaking the work down into manageable sizes.
 
 

Scrum is a powerful methodology that lets you see real results really quickly, but it's not immune to the usual challenges faced by every project.
Let's explore some of the normal challenges and see how scrum addresses them.
Let's start with the most common: an unruly stakeholder.
 

Scrum teams that have been together for years tell me that writing good user stories is the hardest part of Scrum.
I agree, it's hard and it takes a lot of practice.
So, let's talk about some techniques you can use to make it easier for you and your team.

You've got your vision, themes and high-level roadmap for your project.
You've already aligned your stories to your roadmap and now it's time to estimate what you'll be releasing when.
That's what your release plan gives you, an estimate of when functionality will be delivered.

One of the PO's critical responsibilities is to keep the product backlog up-to-date, so there are solid stories for the team to use during sprint planning.
While the PO is organizing the backlog every day, as they watch stories progress, and meet with stakeholders, there's one more ceremony that many teams have found valuable.
And that's backlog grooming.

Servant leadership has become quite a buzz word over the last few years.
The interesting thing is just like scrum itself it takes a traditional idea of management and turns it upside down.
Servant leadership is a philosophy that focuses on ensuring that other people's highest priority needs are met first.
 

There's been a standard model for the stages of group development ever since Bruce Tuckman studied the traits of teams.
These stages are recognized as occurring whether the group is waterfall, agile or a local volunteer organization.
They're basic human behaviors.
 

Once you've led your team through forming and storming, you'll start to see the light at the end of the tunnel as they move into the norming stage.
At this stage the resolution of conflicts during the storming phase have resulted in a greater sense of intimacy and trust among the team members.
You may continue to see an occasional outburst of conflict but they're rare.

One of the primary objectives for the scrum master is to help the team address any impediments or obstacles that get in their way.
Effectively removing these impediments does two things.
First, it helps establish a trusting relationship between the team members and the scrum master.

Like a police force of one, the scrum master must watch for signs of distractions and nip them in the bud to end the problems quickly in order to protect the team.
Let's talk about some of the most common distractions a little more.
We're all victims of drive-by sometimes.
 
 

In our chaotic world of full-time accessibility and 24/7 accountability, it's really easy to skip over successes and move on to the next task on the board.
Don't fall into this trap.
Scrum is simple to execute, but really hard to master, so be sure you're celebrating successes when you have them.