My Journey to Becoming a Scrum Master

I’ve recently began the next chunk of career and life planning by following Michael Hyatt’s “Best Year Ever” process. As I reflect on my professional and personal experiences, I’ve realized that I’ve come a long way; however, and unfortunately, my immediate reaction was frustration.  “Why did it take so long?  What could I have done to shorten my journey?”  These are classic questions asked by a perfectionist that hates wasted time and inefficiency; not to mention, the very thought is sheer folly.  Had I not taken the “long way” around, I would not have gained the experience to help me be the professional I am today.  This post is about my journey to “today” and how it’s helped me be the best Scrum Master I can be.

The Journey

As with most professionals, my journey to becoming a Scrum Master is a windy road that is currently in it’s 18th year.  By pursuing opportunities that I found interesting or creative, I’ve found myself regularly exposed to new and exciting opportunities.  My experiences have included many roles with many responsibilities and I’d like to call out a few that have helped me in my role as a Scrum Master: 

• I was exposed to hundreds of situations that involved one of the following: pre-sales, sales engineering, trade show setup and support, application development, product specialization, on-site technical implementation and support, product development and even dabbled in product management.  Each role taught me the value of preparation (really knowing what the end result should be), customer service and user presentation. 
• When I had an opportunity to become trained as a Certified Scrum Master (CSM), I immediately found it difficult to directly apply the lessons taught.  This kicked off my journey to find creativity in balancing Scrum with traditional waterfall (contract-based) delivery.
• I was heavily involved in implementing Scrum, including rolling out the adoption of Confluence and Jira.  We also worked closely with our delivery teams to implement more agile practices globally.  It was a battle! Lots of conversations between milestone delivery (waterfall / contract delivery) and agile delivery – MANY LESSONS LEARNED.  
• Each role had an element of project management and this is how I found my love of project management.  

A Windy Road to Scrum Master

I’ve always maintained that certifications and role-specific education are meant to be tools that we keep in our toolbox.  My goal was to become a practitioner of delivery so that, when faced with the challenge of helping lead a project to the finish line, I could dig into your toolbox to see what the best tool for the job will be.  Some projects are going to need a solid PMP-style deliverable while others might be best served with a Kanban delivery method.  Some projects will need more help on the front-end with business planning, road-mapping and prioritization, while others need help with technical delivery and support.

My journey has led me to understand that being a Scrum Master isn’t just making sure the team has built a solid sprint or making sure that the user stories contain the “as a … I need to …. so that…” It’s much more than that.  The well-rounded Scrum Master will have experience in Agile projects (of course) but also have experience in things such as business planning, product management, development and/or technical support. This will help them truly understand how a user story is going to bring value, which helps them judge the quality of the story and the value it is intended to bring.  This experience also helps a Scrum Master collaborate/coach a Product Owner to ensure clarity while grooming the backlog. It also helps with coaching a team to look past functional delivery and dig deeper into how the consumer or user is going to leverage this deliverable to bring value to their team or organization.

Today, I’m a Scrum Master that needs to be able to interchange waterfall-ish project management methodologies and reporting with an Agile delivery model.  Tomorrow, I might be a PM that needs to adhere to strict PMP practices while using an agile delivery to gain some kind of value sooner than later.  That is the part of consulting that I love.  I can play all of these roles, still bring value and still help the team get to the finish line.  I’m not silo’ed into a single type of delivery or management, but a blend of them all, focused on bringing value every single day.  

P.S. The Sailing Analogy

The picture I have at the top is from one of my favorite cruising couples, Dan and Kika from the sailing vessel Uma. Before I settled down into married life, I sailed for a few years on Lake Michigan. We did some cruising, but mostly sailed in local competition. During that time, I grew to appreciate the wind and waves and quickly realized that those elements dictated where you went, not your desire to get to the destination as quickly as possible. There were times we could see our destination but needed to sail the opposite direction for 1-2 miles so that we could tack (change direction in the wind) in order to get the right heading. We literally had to go the opposite way for a period of time in order to get to where we needed to be. Such is life…