Red flags were all over when she said,”do scrum” and “fit the schedule into sprints”. Being an IC Agile Professional, I know you don’t just “do scrum”. I was speechless but the speechless system design engineer in me, and now suddenly the new scrum master of the team, had bills to pay. So scrum master it is. So, I decided to start “doing Scrum”. Implementing Agile across a program has been my most challenging, stressful job I have had yet, and I can’t say it has been rewarding. Most people on my team have been doing things their way, doing the SAME thing they have always done for longer than I have been alive. So, being the chosen one to introduce a new way of doing this was not the best work-scenario.
My first scrum ceremony was a fail. No one showed up. Fast forward 6 months, it’s getting better but still the same resistors. I tried a user story writing session. I thought it was going to be a fun-filled session with sticky notes – ended in crickets. The engineers had no idea who the user was, or what a feature is, they only understood architecture. It was baffling to me. Something so easy (writing user stories) was so difficult.
Honestly, the role is undervalued. I feel like it is me against 30+ people, plus I am leading a major change without any authority. Conflicting requests from leadership has been my greatest difficulty. They want agile but also not displaying much support for it. However, I have some learning lessons.
- Before going all crazy with the scrum ceremonies, come up with a plan of what you will introduce and when. Create a presentation of what scrum is and what scrum is not and present that to leadership. Leadership needs to be onboard and fully understand the roles before attempting to change anything. That way you have their authority early.
- Start tracking success. Come up with some goals and how you will get there. It could be participation, stakeholder engagement, process improvement etc. This will take some research.
- Lastly, JOIN SOME AGILE GROUPS. Seriously, you will feel alone sometimes because 9 times out of 10 you will be when someone asks you to do scrum. I found some great podcasts, blogs, and reached out to agile coaches within my organization. By doing so, I found out I wasn’t alone and most of the issues I was facing were normal. I also found out, that people LOVE it, they LOVE talking about SCRUM. Seeing the passion for it motivated me to try harder.
At the end of the day, I am doing this on top of my system design engineering duties and it is not fun. I’m not going to lie. I think if I was back in management consulting where we take a formal approach to change management and business process improvement, it would be much more rewarding. However, casually “doing scrum” is not the way to go.
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