Agile is one of the most abused words and terminologies. Most organizations want to be agile, and they say they are agile and nimble, but it takes ages for them to deliver a successful product or service out of their door to the customer’s hand.
One of the executives who attended one of my Scaled Agile training once asked me ‘isn’t it all the same shit with a different fancy word?”. I answered, saying “I agree with you”. Honestly, I do believe most of the organizations introduce agile into their workstream saying ‘New way of working’, but they keep conducting hours long status updates meetings, filling out pages of documentation, taking years to deliver a simple mobile app or two or three months to hire one employee.
Being agile and doing agile are two different things. If your organization is ‘agile’ you will see that in your workforce. They are more energetic, power packs, motivated, because they do only the value-added things, their energy is not wasted in the least value-added work (such as status update meetings or producing reports). Waste at the end to end process is eliminated. Status updates are not required because you can see the real impact daily.
Being agile needs a mindset change; it is completely unlearning and learning to be the focus on value delivery, learning to remove waste. Learning to question everything which adds waste in the value stream and learning to challenge the historic processes which do not add any value.
Having the right change agents in your organization to do this job is critical if you are serious about being agile. These ‘Agile change agents ‘need to be at every level of the organization. Starting from the boardroom to the operational level, these agile change agents do a phenomenal work of helping others in the organization to adopt an agile mindset.
However, let’s start from somewhere.
At the operational level, we can focus on delivering value by adopting agile values, practices, principles to our everyday workday life. How about cutting down hour-long status update meeting into a visual Kanban wall which your work is visible to all your team members, so a status update is visible? I would say it is easier to say than done. Moreover, that is why I said it is a mindset change and not easy to do. However, in this challenging process, scrum masters are playing a critical role in establishing right practices and being the change agent.
However, not every scrum master is successful in this journey. Reason? Because that is taken very lightly. Most people attend a two-day training and pass certification and then declare them are scrum masters. However, most of them do not have the right skillsets or knowledge to play that kind of a role. That is why LeSS Agile framework says “The Scrum Master role is a new one and often not understood by teams and organisations who are adopting Scrum. A frequent response is to make the “leftover people” the Scrum Masters. They might be nice people but often lack the right skills, motivation, and Scrum knowledge to be effective Scrum Masters.” (LeSS ,2019).
Agile knowledge, experience, passion, maturity, cross-functional skillset, a little bit of psychology, a bit of meditation (or a bit of jazz) are among many things required to become a great scrum master. For several months I tried collecting my mind and jotting down everything, and finally, it looks like a book. ‘Becoming a s rum master’ is now out in production thanks to service providers like Amazon. I hope this will be helpful for those who want to master the skill. If you happen to read it, please pass me the feedback and probably I can make the second edition with the feedback.
