Developing the professional scrum master

If you think this is ugly try
hiring an amateur plumber to fix it. 

The business world has a saying, “If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you hire an amateur.”  The obvious meaning being a poorly trained amateur will cost the company more money than someone who is more expensive but better qualified.  This week I want to talk about the minimum standards of professionalism you should expect from a scrum master.

I am a big believer that with enough time and training anyone can develop a useful skill.  If I devoted ten years of my life learning to be a plumber I could become competent.  Unfortunately, I know myself well enough to know that I need to call a professional when my water heater breaks.  A bonded plumber is worth the time and expense for me to have hot water.

When you get into other activities training is only a small part of the equation.  You can practice piano for years and still not be good enough to entertain an audience not composed of parents.  Jazz musicians refer to the quality of being able to improvise and perform in front of an unpredictable crowd as “chops.”  The idea is that anyone can learn to play the notes, but a real musician has chops.  Hard work, combined with talent makes a jazz musician successful.

I feel the same way about scrum mastery.  Everyone can be trained to do the job, but only a minority can do the job well.  It is the difference between having a high school student perform at your night club and having Elton John setting up a residency.  Fortunately, there are plenty of good programs to train scrum masters.  I am particularly fond of the Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Master certification because it teaches the basics of the job along with the more touchy-feely skills which come with the job.

Once they have received some training, they can then lead a scrum team.  I recommend putting a rookie scrum master with an experienced product owner. This way the scrum master can gain experience with someone who can show them the ropes of the business and the particulars of a project.  With a year or two of experience, a scrum master can help a product owner learn their trade.  Much like the ideas proposed in extreme programming an experienced veteran should partner with a rookie so they both gain from each other’s experience.

With a little luck, you will find someone who is outgoing, a good communicator, empathic, has grace under pressure and can act as team therapist.  Then and only then do you have a scrum master with chops who can take your team to the next level.  So take the time to train your scrum masters.  Next, pair them with experienced developers and product owners, so they gain confidence and experience.  Finally, make sure you find people who possess the talents which will make them successful in the job.  If you do this, you will not have to pay extra for an amateur managing your scrum teams.

Until next time.

How do you fund these Agile projects?

Software professionals are not Lego bricks.

I had the good fortune to finish a training course by Benjamin Day about scrum master skills.  I highly recommend you visit Pluralsight and take his course.  One of the more interesting things about his training was the conversation about how to do annual budgeting with Agile and Scrum.  This week I want to discuss my observations on the subject.

Isaac Socalich wrote a blog post taking about “Legacy thinking” holding back agile adoption at organizations.  He cites the way projects are funded saying accounting practices lead organizations to fund and allocate resources only once around a product, project, or process improvement.  In short, a project has a start, middle, and end.  The people, funding and output of the project are cells in a spreadsheet which manages the project.

This legacy financing model is short sided, counterproductive and the antithesis of the agile movement.  The Agile manifesto stresses “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation,” with legacy financing of projects every activity is reduced to contract negotiation.  The project is conceived with unrealistic expectations.  The deadlines for completion do not reflect the opinions of those doing the work.  Customer considerations are ignored and the funding is at best a guess done by an accountant.  It is no wonder so many software projects fail.  

The most aggravating part of legacy thinking is that treats consultants and people who do the work as machine tools which can be replaced when they are no longer useful.  Teams are created and disbanded based on funding formulas rather than business needs.  This means technical professionals are being treated like mercenaries to build software.  This also creates technical professionals who have no personal investment in the products they are creating.  They are temporary workers billing hours and doing work with no real concern for quality.  

For example, an off-shore team is working on software and because of a lack of funding they are disbanded.  Four months later, the finance department restores funding and a new team is spun up.  The original developers are gone along with the two years of experience they had on the project.  The organization now has to spend the first six months of the project training the off shore team about the business and navigating the legacy code.  The remaining six months of funding is spend attempting to do a year’s worth of labor.  Quality suffers, deadlines are missed and the customer is dissatisfied but the project was correctly funded by the business.

Software teams should be professionals invested in the business and each other rather than disposable Lego bricks.  Projects should be spun up and spun down being given to these project teams.  These teams should remain constant while the projects come and go rather than the other way around.

This is why I like Benjamin Day’s approach so much.  Instead of setting arbitrary deadlines and features to be done by the development team which has no investment in the success of the project, the team is permanent with growing business knowledge and technical skills who take on projects as they are funded.  The business people also concentrate on setting priorities of what gets done.  The project is not thrown over the wall for IT to figure out or fail.  Finally, the business has the right to cancel the project if it is not working.  The team remains to take on the next challenge.  The business either discovers it has working software for the customer and does not need as much funding saving money or has been making a poor investment and can cut its losses.

Over the last fifteen years the Agile Reformation has made great strides in making software development better but it appears that business suites and finance teams are not changing their processes to accommodate this new approach. They do so at the risk to their own business.  Survival is not mandatory and these legacy finance issues will be a cancer in many businesses in the future.  It is up to us in the agile movement to try and help those worth saving.  Otherwise, technologists will be condemned to careers of temporary employment, failure and frustration.

Until next time.

Why You Need E3 Systems

You need our products, find out why.

The life of an entrepreneur is filled with meetings.  Meetings with possible customers.  Meetings with prospective venture capital investors.  Finally, meetings with other entrepreneurs at social events to discuss how to generate more business.  It is a like your life becomes a blur of meetings and it is hard to keep track.  Last week, I attended a meeting with a local business organization to discuss search engine optimization and getting my business ready for the web.  I met some very helpful people and a mentor or two who challenged me about the products I sell and who could use them.  This week on the blog, I wanted to share my thoughts on why you could use E₃ systems.

We founded this organization three years ago because, we wanted to help small and medium sized businesses use the web just like the Fortune 500.  With to cost of bandwidth going down, the use of cloud based services, and the rise of mobile computing we felt that we could create tools which worked over the web for any business.  We also constructed those tools to work on tablet computers, mobile phones and traditional web browsers.

We created our Sully 2.0 tool to help you keep track of your inventory and to generate all the documents you need for shipping and receiving products for your business.  Since the software is cloud based, when we upgrade the software you automatically get an upgrade to your system.  We tied the system with QR coding technology so that you would never have to purchase expensive bar-coding software.  This could save you hundreds of dollars because our inventory management system can work with smart phones instead of expensive bar code scanning software.  With Sully 2.0 you can scan a QR code and see exactly what you have on hand and where it is in your warehouse.  So if you had a chance to keep track of your inventory and save hundreds of dollars in the process wouldn't you do it?

Our Tony tool, for the price of a burger or shake, makes it possible for you to track the maintenance on any vehicle or piece of equipment in your inventory.  This allows you to make sure that all your equipment is under warranty, properly maintained, and provides unimpeachable evidence in case of litigation or an accident.  This will help you save money in maintenance and insurance premiums over the life of your business.  We provided an e-mail reminder feature so that when it is time to fix a vehicle you receive an e-mail and we have also integrated QR code technology and the ability to place scanned receipts into the system to ensure that everything is up regulatory standards.  Again wouldn't you like the peace of mind that comes with having your information regarding any piece of equipment you have at your firm accessible over the cloud to your smartphone, tablet, or PC?  We make that happen.

So we give you easy to use and low cost technology tools which work over the web to help your business save money.  Who wouldn’t want that?  Reach out to us today and see how we can help you.  Being entrepreneur is difficult and filled with meetings but if we can help one business meet its goals then it is worth it.

Until next time.