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20 Tips to make you an Awesome Scrum Master

Jack Nicholson once said

The minute that you are not learning, I believe you are dead

The question for you is, Are you still ‘alive’? Are you ok being one among the thousands, or are you the one who wants to stand out from the crowd?

STOP here if …

STOP here if you are okay with being a mediocre Scrum Master.

READ ON if ..

If you are someone who is looking to sharpen his/her saw, if you are someone who has embraced the culture and mentality of continuous improvement and continuous learning, if you are some one who is looking to advance his/her skills than READ ON.

Join me here every week as I share some advanced skills, tools, and techniques that are guaranteed to make you a better Scrum Master. Join me here every week to advance your skills that will help you advance your career.

With that said, let’s start reviewing the Tips.

[WPSM_AC id=2474]

Like these tips? We request you to share them with your friends and colleagues. 

[bctt tweet=”20 Tips to make you an Awesome #scrumMaster http://www.nimeshsoni.com/20-tips-advanced-scrum-master-skills ” username=”beyondCSM”]

Got your own tips that you want to share with the community? Send us an email.

 

Standard Work

Standard Work is one of the most powerful but least used Lean tools. By documenting the current practices, it forms the baseline for continuous improvement. Let’s review some of the benefits quickly.

Benefits of Standard Work

  • Standardizes the work across different teams, different people; ensuring consistency across the organization; making outcomes predictable and measurable.
  • Sets clear expectations, branding as to what’s ‘given’ when the team/individual says a certain activity is ‘Done’.
  • Ensure that certain routine, mundane tasks get done (and don’t get overlooked due to them being ‘boring’.)
  • A common ‘platform’ is set up, a baseline against which the effectiveness of the individuals and/or team can be measured; ensuring a certain level of quality.
  • It’s the DNA of continuous improvement (CI). It makes CI routine and ingrained in the very existence of the organization.
  • Standard Work is a ‘snapshot‘, a picture of the best way to do things at this moment in time, with an eye on continuous improvement.

Without standard work, there is no kaizen (CI)
– Taichii Ohno

In essence, Standard Work helps you in minimizing waste and maximizing value delivery.

Would it help to have your standard work documented? Can it help you, your team, your organization improve the productivity and deliver more VALUE for your customer?

Go ahead and document your Standard of Work.

What’s Better yet…

Get these Standard Work templates for FREE, and put your team on the “hyper Productivity” lane!

Standardized work is a collection and implementation of the best practices known to that point.

[tabby title=”Scrum Master”]Standard work

 

 

[tabby title=”Product Owner”]Standard work

 

[tabby title=”Scrum Team”]Standard work

 

[tabby title=”Get them All”]Standard work

 

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[tweetthis]Standard Work is a ‘snapshot’, a picture of the best way to do things at this moment in time, with an eye towards Continuous Improvement.[/tweetthis]

Interested in more …

Interested in more than just the Standard Work? How about Checklists, template emails, and worksheets to help your Scrum team?
playbook for scrum teams
Why reinvent? Leverage these Pearls of Agile Wisdom! Grab this Playbook now, for a tiny price!

Get them Now!

Not convinced yet…

Listen to what Steph has to say below 🙂

Testimonial from an actual Customer

I purchased this playbook and find it very helpful.  I think the email templates came in handy when trying to wrangle folks from all over the company together.  They keep me organized and the email now provides more information with these structured templates.

The “Standard Work” for each role is great as well.  It provides helpful hints on role responsibility and helps with keeping me organized with all the artifacts related to a project.

Great work and thanks!

– Steph W

I am convinced! Give it to me Now!

And…

Don’t forget to Subscribe to our mailing list to get more Pearls of Agile Wisdom.


                                                            

                                                                     
No Hero

No Hero: The Evolution of a Navy Seal (New York: New American Library , November, 2015)

No Hero

No Hero: The Evolution of a Navy Seal

Just finished reading this book, and saw lot of similarities between ‘Agile culture’ that we seek to cultivate in an organization and what SEALs go through. The author mentions, Trust is the bedrock of any relation! For a team to function at its peak, they have to trust each other completely. It’s all about the TEAM and making the most of what has been dealt.

The author talks about AAR; the After Action Review, and it reminded me of the Retrospectives we do at the end of each sprint. He suggests:

Conduct AAR with an eye towards improving (the procedures, the team,..) and being honest and open at the AAR

Three Quotes from the book:

  • Only focus on your three-foot world,” he said. “Focus on what you can affect
  • When we make mistakes, we try again and again and again until we get it right. We’re not superheroes. We just commit doing what is right.
  • Rangers think and plan from the top down. The SEALs think and plan from the bottom up

Three Tips from the book:

  • Take what’s there, assess the situation, prioritize, and break it down into small tasks you know you can accomplish or eliminate or fix immediately.
  • Everyone has the right to bitch about a mission or job for five minutes. After those five minutes, you shut the f*** up and get to work.
  • You always want someone in your professional life who is going to be honest, who’s going to call you on your bullshit. [Who is your Swim buddy?]

Are you a SEAL or a Ranger? Are you an asset to your Team?

[bctt tweet=”When we make mistakes, we try again and again and again until we get it right. We’re not superheroes. We’re just committed” username=”beyondCSM”]

Improve Daily Scrum

Daily Scrum or Daily Stand Up is a very important ceremony in the Scrum framework. As part of the Daily Scrum, the team meets on a regular basis for a quick sync up of 15 minutes.

scrum-calendar-daily-standup

Scrum Calendar Events [DS=Daily Scrum]

Remember, you only have 15 minutes to finish this Daily Scrum. We want to use every minute optimally during this ceremony, don’t we? So what are the different ways we can optimize it?  

Top 10 Tips for Daily Scrum

Here are my tips to have the team gel together quickly, as well as eliminate unnecessary churns that will happen at the Daily Scrum. Again, the goal is to maximize every minute of this Daily Scrum and make it a high performing ceremony.

  1. Come Prepared

    Ask your team member to use this tool before they come to Daily Scrum. Have your team members think about their updates before they come to Daily Scrum. Write three things on the Post It notes.

    Daily standup

    Write your updates to the three basic Questions

  2. Be Explicit

    Announce the start and end of your Daily Scrum. Make it explicit, use some specific music or it could be a simple as some one just announcing that it is the ‘START’ and ‘END’ of the Daily Scrum (at the beginning and end of the 15-minute timebox respectively).

    make it Explicit - Announce START and STOP

    make it Explicit – Announce START and STOP

  3. Parking Lot

    Introduce Parking lot and use it extensively to defer the discussions (after the end of Daily Scrum). This will help you keep the momentum during the Daily Scrum and enable you to quickly go through the synch up from each team member.

  4. 4th Question

    Introduce 4th question: Is there anything that you want to discuss with your team member(s) after the Daily Scrum?

    4th Question - Defer to Parking Lot

    4th Question – Defer to Parking Lot

    If yes, the team member mentions it quickly and someone captures it into the Parking Lot. Review and discuss the items on Parking Lot after the Daily Scrum is completed.

  5. After Party

    This is a time set aside, allocated for the discussion that we deferred during the Daily Scrum. You may have put a couple of items in the Parking Lot. Once the end of the Scrum is announced, some of the team members would stay back for their respective discussions. This is what I refer to as to as After Party!

    All the team members do not need to stay back, only the ones who are required for the discussion would.

    Want to #getHyper?

    Want to know more tips to improve your Daily Scrum? your Scrum implementation?
    Check out and grab a copy of my book Get Hyper [OFFER]

  6. (Better) Equipments

    Just have proper equipment(s) to provide better quality audio and video to the team members.

    Yes, the Daily Scrum has to be in person. And team members have to be there physically for the Daily Scrum. With that said, there will always be some exceptions where a team member cannot attend the Daily Scrum in person. You will have to have a way for them to remotely attend the Daily Scrum. Having better quality audio will tremendously improve the productivity of your Daily Scrum.

    You can provide better quality audio for under $50 investment in a bluetooth speaker. Here is the one that I carry in my beg all the time.

  7. (Update) Working Agreements

    You need to cover those exceptions (as discussed in Tip# 6) in your working agreement, have the team talk about it as to how they will handle those scenarios where a team member cannot attend the Daily Scrum in person. Amend your working agreements to cover that scenario.

    For example, one of my team had this on their working agreement:
    When a team member cannot attend in person…

    1. S/he will provide the updates to his/her Buddy. This buddy will bring those updates to the team in person.
    2. If that cannot be done then the team member will jump on the conference call.
    3. When everything else fails, send an email addressed to the team with your updates.

    Bottom line is to have your team discuss these scenarios and update their working agreements accordingly.

  8. Break the eye contact

    I have seen this time and time again, especially with the new teams. Often times when providing the updates, a team member is looking at the Scrum Master (only) as if she is providing the updates to the Scrum Master and not the team. Now, remember Daily Scrum is for the team. A team member is providing the updates to others on the team, not just to the Scrum master. To break this mode I often encourage my Scrum Masters to break the eye contact. As soon as a team member starts providing updates to you as a Scrum Master, look away from her. Look at the floor or look at your scrum board; do whatever to break that eye contact. This will encourage them to look at other team members.

  9. Be Absent, intentionally

    I encourage Scrum Master to occasionally skip the Daily Scrum, be absent intentionally.The goal here is to see how the team handles your absence.
    Does the Daily Scrum break apart because you are not there or does the team step up and handle it nicely.
    This will also give you indication as to whether the team is self-organizing and tackles those scenarios by themselves

  10. Make it Visible

    The last and the most important tip I think is to make it Visible. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words! So, use all the visual props, you can use a wall in the hallway as your Scrum Board, or use some flip chart papers and start using that as your Scrum Board.

    Put your posters on that and use it while having the Daily Scrum. Post your Working Agreements, Definition of Done, and Definition of Ready in the Daily Scrum area. In short, make it visual!

As I mentioned, in the beginning, these are simple techniques that I have used a lot when I start working with new scrum teams. I often introduced this in an incremental fashion. They are very effective and impactful.

What tips are you employing to keep your Daily Scrum on track, to finish it on time while keeping it useful and productive for the Team?

Let us know and we will include it in this list, along with credit to you of course.

[Updated] Mr. Number to your Rescue!

Mr. Number to your Rescue! Remember those telemarketers calling you just as you finish your dinner? I used to get them a lot on my landline, even after getting onto Do not Call list. Those dreaded, 9:00 pm dinner time calls are back! Now I started getting them on my Mobile as well.

These unwarranted, unsolicited calls are a big drain on your energy. They disrupt your ‘flow‘ and introduce unnecessary ‘switching cost’ as you are yanked away from the work you were doing. Often times you don’t know until you have picked up the call, and if you don’t pick up the call, you are wondering if you missed an important call. [For those of us whose family is overseas, we get a call from them and it shows up as a random number on Caller ID]

Mr. Number to the Rescue

Mr. NumberI have found an easy solution, though! Call Mr. Number to your rescue!

On your mobile, just install this app and it scans the incoming calls. It scans each incoming call against its vast database of telemarketers and scam callers. It automatically blocks the call if any match is found. This results in you not even picking up that call and saving you that energy, the switching cost. More importantly, it allows you to stay in the flow!

Use this app, along with the Do not Disturb feature of your phone, and you have your own personal secretary (remember those creatures!) that is guarding your time, for you 🙂

distractions-switching-cost-getHyper

[bctt tweet=”minimize the distractions + minimize/eliminating the switching cost = Hyper Productivity! #getHyper with Mr. Number!” username=”beyondCSM”]

[Updated on 27Dec2016]

We beat AT&T as well a Wall Street Journal 🙂

Mr. NumberAT&T recently introduced an app named ‘Call Protect’. This FREE app promises to block robocall and all the other junk calls. Essentially, this app is powered by Hiya; the app we talked about earlier when we published our post. Here is the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article talking about this app. Didn’t I tell you we beat WSJ ?!

[bctt tweet=”Claim back your valuable time! #getHyper” username=”beyondCSM”]

Please add this app to your tools, start using it and claim back some of your valuable time!