A scrum master should do more than punch a clock

A good scrum master is like a good camp counselor

As we head into summer, it is a good time to reflect on the first half of the year.  I am going through numerous personal and professional changes.  My role is going to be changing at my firm and there are plenty of comings and going.  This week I wanted to discuss some insight I gained at the office.

Many of you know, I am a big fan of Angela Dugan and her blog The TFS Whisperer.  For three days, she came to my firm and conducting training for Visual Studio Team Services and spent quality time with Product Owners at my firm.  What happened next was a revelation.  The following Monday half of the scrum masters in the organization were rolled off.

I think it would be unprofessional and small to discuss the details of why those scrum masters are gone.  Instead, I will say their departure reflects a divide in the agile profession of scrum master.  There are two camps; one camp see being a scrum master as being a glorified project manager, the other camp sees the scrum master as a servant leader, coach, and therapist for development teams.  I belong in the latter camp.

There is plenty of blogs on the web which say that being a scrum master is not being a project manager.  Yet, I see some scrum professionals who see their job as nothing more than scheduling meetings and updating the scrum board too.  This is not being a scrum master.  It is a person accustomed to doing things the old way of attempting to survive in the corporate rat race.  They do not really add value and often create scrum-butt situations.

In my opinion, a scrum master is more than someone who punches a clock and generates reports.  They are more like a camp counselor or youth pastor minus the bad facial hair.  They have to hold other people accountable.  They have to train product owners to a basic level of competence.  They have to make sure that people are shipping working product into production.  Finally, they have to keep people motivated because software development can devolve into a soul-crushing activity.

In short, being a scrum master is hard emotional and intellectual work.  If you are not willing to do that work then you are likely to get rolled off a client.

Until next time.

Process is a lame excuse

Responding to change is like jazz, blues, and rock

One of the central tenants of the agile manifesto is responding to change over following a plan.  For someone with a background in science or engineering it seems commonsense.  Sadly, many people in leadership roles see responding to change as a threat.  This week I want to talk about “process” and why it get in the way of agility.

I have plenty of late nights and early mornings on the phone with off-shore consultants.  These meeting are typical stand-up meetings familiar with co-located teams.  It is also an opportunity to share technical knowledge.  According to the scrum guide, stand up meeting should be fifteen minutes long.  The scrum guide does not take into account a team thirteen time zones away and working with complex legacy system.  So our meeting lasts about thirty minutes and we have follow up calls between individual members.  We have no formal process but the scrum guide is not helpful so we responded to change over following a plan and had a longer meeting.

Many business leader like to say they have processes in place to minimize risk.  It has been my experience that many of those processes are in place to maximize control because those business leaders do not trust their people to do the job correctly.  This makes me sad.  Instead of working with customers and solving problems, many people spend their days wrestling with the bureaucracy and process.  Confronted with this environment people loose initiative and motivation.  Eventually, nothing gets done except the stale process.

This may have worked fifty years ago but product cycles are measured in weeks instead of years today.  People need to be motivated and engaged if the wish to compete in this new business environment.  Process makes it hard for people to be motivated and engaged because it discourages original thinking and ownership of decisions.

That does not deter business leaders from coming up with more process.  To them, a business is like a symphony orchestra with every not scripted and every performer knowing his or her place.  If someone deviates from the music sheet or the conductors instructions then they are expelled.  I strongly disagree with this metaphor, I see a business like a jazz or blues combo.  The players have strong technical skills but com improvise based on the situation and can adapt to changing situations with the audience.  To a command and control business leader, this is unacceptable and a recipe for chaos.  To the agilest, it is responding to change over following a plan.

One of my favorite stories about Jazz history is about Benny Goodman.  A critic said his music was immature and untrained.  Goodman responded by recording Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A major to critical and popular acclaim.  In a more modern context Wynton Marsalis plays trumpet in both jazz in classical situations.  Finally, Trombone Shorty easily transitions between Jazz and Rock music.  In short, it is common for jazz musicians to cross over into other styles of music while it is uncommon for classical performers to do so.  I blame the “process” of training and conditioning of classical musicians who struggle in ambiguous creative environments.

This is the big challenge of business.  Do we want our employees to be like classical musicians of like jazz musicians?  In my opinion, I am going to trust my business to the jazz nerds.  The will be able to respond to change when necessary.  This is why I rebel against process.  I see process as a necessary evil.  I also see it fungible and able to change.  This drives my superiors crazy because sometimes the process is the only thing which keeps them in control.  Squeaky wheels often call attention to a bad axle and managers hate that.

So I say to you, treat process with contempt and skepticism because it is an excuse for behavior at a company rather than a reason.  This makes it impossible to respond to change.  W.E. Deming said, “Survival is not mandatory,” if you follow process chances are you are more likely to become extinct.

Until next time.

When to hang it up

Sometimes you have to pack your bags.

Last week I spoke about “struggle” and what I felt it meant.  It inspired a strong reaction from a few people.  Watching this reaction, it dawned on me, I was witnessing a conversation I had three years ago.  Each of us have moments in our careers where we consider leaving and going someplace else. Some of us have that choice forced upon us while others have a “moment of clarity” and then give their notice to their boss.  This week I want to talk about when it is time to leave.

I have been a software consultant and full time software developer for many years.  It was filled with frustration and failure.  Additionally, when I was a consultant I was often treated like high paid “help” who was supposed to keep his head down, mouth shut, and ignore the dysfunction which surrounded me.  I even completed a project early for a client and instead of being rewarded with an extension I was thanked and promptly rolled off.  I have been fired a week before Christmas and had to explain it my former spouse.  I have looked over my shoulder worried I was not good enough and smart enough to work with the other developers in my company.  I needed to make change.

With my own money, I took my Certified Scrum Master training.  I was feeling despair and working as a heads down developer was taking a toll on me.  This was a chance to practice what I preached about Agile.  After becoming an architect at a different firm, they learned about my Scrum Master training and made me the servant leader of development team.  Looking back on that experience, I realize that I was raw, cocky and untested.  One developer openly rebelled against me right away and I would spend weeks and months attempting to effect change.

That was three years ago.  Now, I am training product owners for division of my company, serving as a scrum master, and being “spun off” as my firm splits into three companies.  In those three years, being in the trenches as a scrum master has made me a much better servant leader.  I am even participating in the company mentoring program.  I voiced that I was restless and frustrated with the pace of change I am trying to effect and it looks like someone listened. For me, it is a sign that I need to stay because big changes are coming and my peers and superiors see that I should be part of that change.

I will only speak for myself but if you cannot get training through your work and if you are asked to do one thing but are rewarded for doing something else then it is time to leave.  Before I started working as a scrum master, I was a senior developer for a food company.  I was talking about a software project with a superior and he said I should start over because it didn’t look like something he could use on his iPad.  It was the final straw and with-in a month I was gone.  Since then, that company has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in agile consulting and they laid-off over 100 people, mostly older workers, in order to be more nimble.  They could have saved a lot of money and preserved those jobs if they just figured out how to keep me and allow me to spread agile through the firm.  I am glad I am no longer there.

Each member of the agile community is responsible for his or her own career.  We have to make choices every day about what we do and who we serve.  We also need to remember that we need to serve ourselves.  If we are unhappy or frustrated with what we are doing then we need to change.  If that means leaving one company to go to another then so be it.  For me, I am staying where I am.  I am entering an exciting time of change and I look forward to the challenges.  When I can’t say that any more then I have to quit.

Until next time.

Being a scrum master is about struggle.

This is what struggle looks like.

Some careers are prestigious.  Others people have high paying careers.  Finally, there are plenty of people who define their careers based of the daily struggles they give.  This week after a long three day weekend I want to talk about struggle.  

When I hear the word “struggle” it sounds like a cliche.  I have heard pampered athletes use it to describe contract negotiations.  I have seen interviews with escaped murderers talk about their “lives of struggle.”  I have even witnessed a teen-ager user the term “struggle” to describe efforts to find a liquor store to sell him beer under age.  Struggle can get to be pretty meaningless because it has so many different meaning to so many different people.   Describing struggle seems just as futile as describing “love.”

My definition of struggle requires personal sacrifice in the face of indifference and hostility.  The example I use to illustrate struggle is the lives of ballet dancers.  For years, they toil in obscurity.  A dancer can spend hours practicing and in rehearsal.  They contend with abusive instructors, self-doubt, eating disorders, and injury.  All of this pain and sacrifice for a chance to be on stage and hear the applause of the crowd.  Dancers also suffer a physical toll for this life and it is clear to see when you look at photographs of the feet of dancers.  To me, that is struggle.

A scrum master’s life is to be in a constant struggle with the organization, colleagues and the status quo.  You are like Don Quixote in Man of La Moncha jousting with windmills and upsetting the authorities.  It is not the kind of career which allows quick advancement up the corporate ladder.  A scrum master must listen like a minister, inspire like an apostle, and be ostracized like a martyr.  They should have good technical skills and social skills good enough to act like a therapist to the people around them.  It is not an easy job. 

So to be a scrum master is to live a life of struggle.  You don’t go into it for fame and fortune.  You do it in order to make a difference in the organization and if that is not why you are their then you need to be doing something else. 

Until next time.

Failure is the starting point for success

I grew up during Morning in America

I am a scrum master which always raises questions when I talk about it at family gatherings and dinner parties.  People ask me what I do for a living and when I tell them I am a scrum master they look perplexed.  “You mean like a project manager,” they ask.  I have to assure them that it is more than just being a project manager.  I am a servant trying to solve problems for the team members.  I lead and participate in countless meetings.  I know the current weather in Chennai and know some great people half a world away who happen to build web sites.  I also spend most of my time dealing with failure.  This week, I wanted to discuss with you failure and how it will make you a better scrum master.

Growing up in 1980’s America is a difficult time to describe to others.  Ronald Reagan was the president.  Instead of random acts of terrorism, young people like myself were worried about civilization being destroyed by nuclear weapons from Russia.  Gay people were dying of a disease known as AIDS and government didn’t care until the epidemic could no longer be ignored.  At the same time, music was alive with energy from punk and the New Romantic Movement became television friendly with the birth of MTV.  Deficit spending and a military build-up spawned an economic boom and as a teen-ager you were sold a bill of goods which said if you said no to drugs, worked hard in school, and pushed yourself you could be a successfully person.  As Dickens said, “It was the best of times and the worst of times.”

This cult of success infected everything in the 1980’s.  If someone wasn’t succeeding then it was because they were not working hard enough or smart enough to succeed.  If you failed you deserved to fail and you deserved the shame that accompanied it.  It is no surprise that when the economy fell apart in the early 1990’s that sales of anti-depressant drugs sky-rocketed.  It was a bitter pill to swallow because the bill of goods we were sold was phony and shallow.  Confronted with failure on such a huge scale an entire generation decided to go a different path.

Today, I look back on that period of time not with any nostalgia but rather as a profound learning lesson.  The economy failed on a scale unseen and countless driven and hard-working people were forced on the side lines.  Rather than giving up we made due the best they could carving out a cultural niche which will quickly get swamped by the millennial generation.  My generation taught to worship success learned to cope with failure and how to bounce back.  It has taken me twenty six years from when I marched out of college to the present day.  I have worked in radio, the casino business, and technology.  I have failed numerous times knowing that it will prepare me for future successes.

Failure is natural and instead of shunning it we should embrace it as the learning opportunity which it is.  Failure helps you avoid common mistakes.  Failure helps you weigh risk and know when to take a chance and when to let an opportunity pass you by.  Failure inspires success because it forces you to focus your energy and time on what you need to do to succeed.  Failure is just as important as success we just don’t recognize it as much as we should.   So if you are a scrum master, embrace failure because it is the ultimate learning tool for you and your team.

Until next time.

Keeping it simple.

The light switch should be our inspiration

One of the most important principles in Agile is simplicity.  I work with plenty of clever people which means we come up with plenty of complicated ways of doing things.  True innovation and progress happens when we find simple ways of doing complicated things.  This week we are covering the virtues of simplicity.

When we talk about simplicity, we are not talking about something which is simple.  We are talking about something which is simple to use, simple to work with and simple to understand.  The example I like to use most, is the electrical power grid.  When we need to put a light in a room we plug in a lamp and turn on the switch.  The technology and work that goes into getting electricity to that lamp is very complex to but to us it is simple.

Technology like smart phones, web sites and accounting software should be like the electrical power grid.  Sadly, it is not.  Microsoft technologies are great for PC’s but in order to write web applications for a phone you need Xamarin or understand HTML5 to write Windows 10 applications.  Those applications do not work on Android and iOS devices.  This is just a sample of some of the technologies which do not play nice with each other for either market or technical reasons.

The blame for this trend is very smart people who, instead of working together to create simple and elegant solutions, have split into warring tribes.  It would take an entire book to discuss the history of why this has happened.  So to the average consumer we have a layer of complexity to everything we do and it needs to stop.  Even Apple has made music players a colossal mess making it impossible for people to manage the thousands of songs in their music libraries.

I do not have any magic bullets to fix this but is up to everyone in the agile community to try and reduce this kind of complexity.  It will not be easy but neither was setting up the national power grid.
Until next time.

Reputation is not licence to be a jerk

We know lots of people like this.  A few of them 
 set the conversation of the technology world.
 Image courtesy of Slate.com.

The world of technology is filled with plenty of smart, talented and colorful personalities.  This dynamic was one of the reasons why I was drawn to the business.  This week I want to talk about of these colorful personalities and how he represents some of the worst impulses in the technology business.

There are plenty of stereotypes in the technology business.  These are reinforced by popular culture in productions as diverse as James Bond movies, the Fox series 24, and the HBO program Silicon Valley.  Having over 18 years’ experience in the business, I have seen many of these stereotypes in real life.  I have also met plenty of great people who are unique and innovative in every way.

By any standard, Alex St. John should be seen as one of the leading minds in the technology field. He was self-educated and self-taught.  He created the DirectX technology which powers Xbox and just about every PC game on Windows.  His work helped make Microsoft the power house it is and he earned further accolades founding his own company.  This kind of achievement should make St. John a good will ambassador for the technology field instead, he is coming off as a colossal jerk.

I can provide numerous examples which have already been articulated elsewhere on the web.  These offenses break down into three categories.

• He does not see the value of women in technology.  Exhibit A.
• He thinks that exploitative work conditions in the software business, particularly, the game business are acceptable.  Exhibit B.
• Finally, anyone who disagrees with him is a “whiner” of not willing to work hard.  Exhibit C.

I have stated repeatedly, technology needs more women.  The fresh perspective they provide to technology is essential to improving product quality.  It also makes the office less like a Mongol raiding party and more like a 21st century work place.  The less testosterone in technology the better.

Next repeated studies have shown that long hours are a hindrance to productivity rather than a boon.  Notions of “crunch” time and working eighty hour work weeks are exploitative and boarder on the illegal practice of wage theft.  Additionally, the twelve principle of Agile discourage this mindset stressing development should sustainable.  To St. John and others developer burn-out, turnover, and alienation are the cost of doing business.  Technology workers are not different that sweatshop workers and they should be grateful for the conditions.

Finally, St. Jon has ridiculed people who disagree with him about issues of diversity and exploitation of tech workers by claiming they are not ambitious enough or smart enough to understand his arguments.  In St. John’s world, I would have died of a heart attack because I would be living on steady diet of caffeine, pizza, and stress.  The technology world has undermined two of my marriages because of high stress, turn over, and uncertain employment conditions.  It is hard to keep good employees if they don’t see or sleep with their significant others.  I consider myself a valuable professional to any organization, but to St. John, I am just a pencil to be ground down into a nub to be replaced by someone else just as disposable.

Bottom line, if you do not agree with St. John, then you are neither smart nor talented enough to work in technology.  This may explain why he is spending more time coaching CEO’s and HR professionals on how to recruit technology talent than actually managing technology talent.  I have worked for people like St. John who are convinced of their intellectual and moral superiority. It is not fun and I consider those periods the low points of my career.  Technology is changing thanks to agile and efforts to improve diversity.  Faced with the changing environment you can, lead, follow, or get out of the way.  I think that St. John is about to get trampled to death.

Until next time.