A Scrum Master Retrospective
I saw a post about doing a personal retrospective, and it seemed like a good time.
The year has had some strong successes. If you're into the shu/ha/ri model, I feel like as an organization, we have gotten pretty good at stage 1. After a year+ of doing it, we have solidified the habitual motions of Scrum. People are working together more, there's been a lot of product knowledge shared, we're getting better as a group at estimating (and stressing out a bit less about estimating -- I fear that "no estimates" would be a tough sell here at the moment).
The biggest success for me personally was going to the Agile Games back in the spring; I don't think it's overstating to say that it was life-changing. Whole new areas to learn about have opened up for me, and I'm excited to keep moving in this direction. I did some improv, I led some Open Space conversations (for which I was totally unprepared but loved it), I did a kick-ass presentation with a colleague about what we learned. I learned about the existence of LEGO in the workplace, and clean language. I read a lot of books, subscribed to a lot of podcasts, finally understand how binary works. I've done a lot of thinking about what I want -- from a job, from my career, from myself. I've learned a lot about my own limits.
One area where I feel success remains elusive is in the generation of enthusiasm about agile itself, about the inspect-and-adapt cycle as a practice, and even about the idea of working in teams. Things I tried with my team(s) this year include: GTKY questions, collecting birthdays, pet photos, team member trivia, non-standard retrospective formats, food (healthy and not, homemade and not), "check in" Core Protocol, sharing articles about stuff like maker schedules... nothing has really taken off with this group. I readily admit that I'm a little bummed out about all of this, and my impulse at this point is to withdraw my energy. I am learning, by feeling my way through the experience, things that do and don't work in this role.
A reorg is in the works for early next year, and there is little information yet about what that's going to mean, but it seems like any new efforts should be shelved until we see how that falls out. Therefore I drafted the above, and then let it sit for a few days until we had our regular end of sprint retrospective, to see what the teams thought about our progress this year.
Most of the conversation was people expressing anxieties about the reorg. One person opined that we've come a long way in our agile adoption; another seemed more tentative; most expressed no opinion. There's that enthusiasm, again? We'll see what happens in the new teams.
I am still setting goals for next year, but I do know that I want to shift the balance; less theory, more praxis, more experiments and more reflection. More blog posts, too, reflecting more than "what did I do today." I'm going to be more involved in the real world community via the Agile Games, and hopefully find time to attend some local meetings.
The year has had some strong successes. If you're into the shu/ha/ri model, I feel like as an organization, we have gotten pretty good at stage 1. After a year+ of doing it, we have solidified the habitual motions of Scrum. People are working together more, there's been a lot of product knowledge shared, we're getting better as a group at estimating (and stressing out a bit less about estimating -- I fear that "no estimates" would be a tough sell here at the moment).
The biggest success for me personally was going to the Agile Games back in the spring; I don't think it's overstating to say that it was life-changing. Whole new areas to learn about have opened up for me, and I'm excited to keep moving in this direction. I did some improv, I led some Open Space conversations (for which I was totally unprepared but loved it), I did a kick-ass presentation with a colleague about what we learned. I learned about the existence of LEGO in the workplace, and clean language. I read a lot of books, subscribed to a lot of podcasts, finally understand how binary works. I've done a lot of thinking about what I want -- from a job, from my career, from myself. I've learned a lot about my own limits.
One area where I feel success remains elusive is in the generation of enthusiasm about agile itself, about the inspect-and-adapt cycle as a practice, and even about the idea of working in teams. Things I tried with my team(s) this year include: GTKY questions, collecting birthdays, pet photos, team member trivia, non-standard retrospective formats, food (healthy and not, homemade and not), "check in" Core Protocol, sharing articles about stuff like maker schedules... nothing has really taken off with this group. I readily admit that I'm a little bummed out about all of this, and my impulse at this point is to withdraw my energy. I am learning, by feeling my way through the experience, things that do and don't work in this role.
A reorg is in the works for early next year, and there is little information yet about what that's going to mean, but it seems like any new efforts should be shelved until we see how that falls out. Therefore I drafted the above, and then let it sit for a few days until we had our regular end of sprint retrospective, to see what the teams thought about our progress this year.
Most of the conversation was people expressing anxieties about the reorg. One person opined that we've come a long way in our agile adoption; another seemed more tentative; most expressed no opinion. There's that enthusiasm, again? We'll see what happens in the new teams.
I am still setting goals for next year, but I do know that I want to shift the balance; less theory, more praxis, more experiments and more reflection. More blog posts, too, reflecting more than "what did I do today." I'm going to be more involved in the real world community via the Agile Games, and hopefully find time to attend some local meetings.
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