The Quick Brown Fox

This is the third session in my brown bag series. It's not an "agile" topic really, but it was one of the things people requested a session on.  I hoped that people would bring their questions and be willing to discuss them. There were four topics proposed, and some conversation although it was mostly people in the room. Here is the outline:  Day before, set up a Trello board as an option for people to raise topics and added a link to the invitation. Recruited a co-pilot who would watch the WebEx chat and bring up anything that came in through that.  Five minutes before the session, dial in to WebEx, start camera, ensure that screen sharing is set up and the projector is working.  Noon - official start time. 

This is a follow-up to my previous post about getting the offshore and local teams to work together. Armed with the results of my brainstorming session with the team, I met with a representative of the offshore group. I was prepared to bargain, to set limits, to look for a way to help them move forward without jeopardizing my team's sprint backlog.  What I heard, in the course of ten minutes, was that the offshore group only has 2-3 stories every sprint that might benefit from our attention, and that while they do occasionally get stuck, mostly they want up-front guidance and code reviews -- things that can easily be scheduled and shouldn't, if all goes well, take more than a few hours of team from one or two people in a given sprint.  That's what the big deal was? I thought as I jotted notes.  More often than not, I have found that problems are not complicated to resolve if people just take ten minutes to discuss the situation.  

This week something unusual happened: two different people who are not on my team approached to ask for help with impediments. Removing impediments is, of course, one of the chief responsibilities of a Scrum Master. We're supposed to be way-smoothers, facilitating the team's work. One issue was very straight-forward, and was actually given to me because it seemed to involve a piece of documentation (my other job); my boss wasn't sure what the complaint was about or what needed to be done to resolve it. I talked to the Scrum Master who had raised the impediment, together we talked to one of the members of the team affected, and confirmed that the issue had already been automated away and could be closed. Easy-peasy. The other item is ongoing, and I want to document it here, because it's the kind of thorny recurring problem that can't be easily resolved. It has to do with collaboration between one of the local teams and the offshore group. HQ is farming out more a...

The second in my "brown bag" series at work wasn't really a brown bag at all. Given the expansive possibilities in the topic and limited time in which to work with them, I decided to do this one as a self-guided installation. I had a lot of fun researching and designing the materials for this one! I divided the room into three stations: Drive Find Your Why Management 3.0  Each station had a large sticky note on which I wrote out some highlights of that particular approach to motivation, an interactive portion, and at least one printed takeaway. For Drive I made up a bunch of true/false questions; for Find Your Why there was a thing to match the company to their public mission statement, and for Management 3.0 I printed out a bunch of Moving Motivators card sets.  As it happens, hardly anybody came, because we're updating Jira this weekend and there was a meeting scheduled about that which conflicted with mine. I admit that this was frustrating; motivation...

I thought it might be useful to record more details about the session I did on this subject. Not least because I might want to do it again someday.

After 2 1/2 years of doing the job on a part-time basis, yesterday I had my first interview for a Scrum Master position. I did not get the job -- I didn't particularly expect to, my first time out -- but it was an interesting experience. At least now I know what kind of questions people tend to ask prospective Scrum Masters, and they gave me some feedback on my interview style, which I suppose might be useful. There were a lot of, "Tell us about a time when you solved a problem" style questions, which I more or less expected. There were some very specific questions posed about their company and their team situation, some which I was able to address better than others. There were a lot  of questions about how I ended up in Scrum from tech writing, which on the one hand is obviously a common reaction to my resume, and on the other hand started to annoy me by the end of the afternoon -- not least because it looked like the nine people I spoke to had not coordinated at all....

I did my brown bag session today. In the end 10 people showed up for an exercise on how to create a continual improvement plan. I thought that was pretty good for a pilot. A 45 minute timebox made for a bit of a breakneck pace, and the most common piece of feedback afterward was that more time would have been nice, but people seemed engaged throughout, and overall the comments were positive. The next challenge of course is on how to follow this up with another good topic. Motivation was one that got a lot of interest, although a bit more challenging to design a class around.