Happy New Year everyone and apologies for not blogging in such a long time. I don’t know about you, but I have no idea where 2018 went!  It seemed to speed past so quickly..

I have been busy with a relatively new client and was due to be there a couple of days the other week when ‘The Boss’ called up proclaiming  ‘man flu’, and wanted me to support him on his Certified ScrumMaster Class. Now, I don’t really buy into ‘man flu’ but he was a pitiful sight to behold, and so went along to do some of the heavy lifting. It’s been a good few months since I last trained Scrum, but it all came flooding back to me   It was while there that I got the inspiration for this blog. I met a man who was literally starting as a ScrumMaster 9am the day after the course, and he wanted to know what needed to be done in his first few days and weeks.   So I reeled off a few things for him to consider and then wrote him a nice poster with all the details on to take away. 

I have not heard from him since the class, but I am hoping everything has worked out for him!

I thought other people might be interested in this and so here I am blogging about it.  I have taken the liberty to expand on some of the points. I was going to make a mind map, but all the ones I tried would not let you export an image for free  

Stage 1 (First few days and weeks)

• Meet the team and get to know them and what they want to achieve. Agree regular 121's to keep the conversations flowing.
• If the team is already up and running, spend some time observing.
• Organise a team building event. Encourage team members to get involved in the organisation.
• Has the Team used Scrum or Kanban before? Do they need to have some sort of training?
• Meet the Product Owner. Get to know them, their history and what they want to achieve. Discuss both of your roles and what you expect from each other. Discuss what to do if you do not agree with each other.
• Discuss the product with the Product Owner. Understand the Vision, roadmap, commitments, issues and risks.
• Review the Product Backlog. If it does not exist, we need to help facilitate creating one. Do we need to complete user story mapping?
• Set up regular sessions with the PO to keep collaborating. Encourage them to sit with the team.
• Does the team sit together? If not organise this. Ensure that the team has either a TV or visual board.
• Create an initial board to start putting work on. This can be refactored as you get the team up and running.
• How does the team store information? If some form of wiki, SharePoint or other doesn't exist. Think about creating one (after discussion with the team)
• Facilitate getting a team Definition of Done.
• Set up Sprint or Cadence structure in diaries. Plan for more refinement sessions if the team has to create the backlog from scratch.
• Set up a holiday chart and make visible in the team space.

Stage 2 (Coming weeks and months)

• Understand 'other' teams, people or third parties we might have dependencies with. Meet these people and agree ways of working.
• Create a stakeholder map and plot all of the key people on. Plan how you can meet all of these people.
• Understand Staff Liquidity. Implement knowledge share as needed.
• If using Scrum, think about creating calibration stories for referring to in estimation sessions.
• Set up team metrics (CFD, Burnup, Burndown, Lead time Distribution, Defect ratio, Waste, Work in progress, Net flow, Live status, Bugs, time to deploy, % automation, % fails of automation, build times, ticket age, throughput rates.
• Consider if we need to create 'End of sprint one page' report for stakeholders.
• Refactor the Board. Think about how to visualise: Blockers, Avatars, waiting, dependencies, issues and risks, different types of work, expedites, defects, WIP limits, capacity allocations, abandoned work, external teams collaborating with you (to name a few)
• What engineering practices do we need to consider and implement? Understand what is done now and work with the team to define where we want to be.
• Understand what the release process is, and the frequency of this. If people are involved outside of the team. Become their friend!
• Understand current state of play for : Tooling, environments, levels of automation, CI/CD strategy, testing strategy, Source control, coding standards, online tool such as VSTS or JIRA.
• Work with the Product Owner to create a Release Plan and any metrics they need to help manage flow of stories, value and delivery.
  
  

I am sure there are things missing and so feel free to leave comments for other people to get the benefit of your knowledge as well. I can then add them in for an AWESOME list!

I will try and not leave it as long next time.

To quote Jerry Springer ‘Look after yourself, and each other’

Helen

xxx

It’s been a pretty interesting couple of weeks with my adventures taking me to Kingston for a new client (note don’t get on slow train!), holding the Agile Coaching Exchange with Liz Keogh, and waving good bye to a client I have spent the last 15 months with.

For those that couldn’t make the exchange this month you missed Liz talking about complexity theory, and I have admit she managed what two others couldn’t do and that was to really help me to understand what Cynefin is. I think the breaking point was the inclusion of an exercise that made it seem real to me, and working in groups that helped to reconfirm the learning. I am not sure I am ready to write a blog about Cynefin yet, so I have included a few photos of the event and a link to Liz’s blog who covers it a whole lot better than I would. Thank you Liz!

Next week I am pretty excited to be attending the David Anderson Train the Trainer Class as part of the Lean Kanban University. It will be the first time I have met David and I am hoping to extend my knowledge further to really support driving good Kanban in organisations. It doesn’t hurt either that it’s in Turkey. I am sure I am going to have loads of good stuff to blog about on my return.

Photo of actual place of learning (wooooooooo!)

So my topic of the week is something that my colleague Mark Summers and I presented recently at both Scrum Gathering Las Vegas and XP2013 Vienna. It is also something that we both are very passionate about Growing ScrumMasters for the Future.

The challenge we faced was an organisation that was growing vastly in size and with an enormous intake of new ScrumMasters, who had a varied degree of experience and knowledge. We wanted to be able to support them in their knowledge and create a safe learning environment for them to put key skills into practice. From that point forward the ScrumMaster Education Programme was created.

Over the 6 month period that we ran the programme I put together an experience report of what we did and learned. I wanted to share with you that report so you can read and see the success that we had. Building this programme and watching our ScrumMasters grow was something that I took great enjoyment from and something that I am pretty proud of.

Click here for the ScrumMaster Education Programme Experience Report

Click here for the ScrumMaster Competency Framework

Even though I am leaving this client, I am happy in the knowledge that we have built a strong community of practice, and that they will continue to educate themselves without me. I have no doubt that we have been nurturing the Agile Coaches of the future.

Good bye guys, I am going to miss you all.

Final Thoughts

Learning is often something that gets pushed to one side when all hell breaks loose in the office. We practice Continuous Improvement in our teams, so why do we fail at doing this personally?

My mission for you is to learn something new this week.

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