I joined the company in January 2018, and currently we have five scrum masters for each scrum digital team, which is Portal, Mobile Apps, eStore, Enterprise, and Digital Retail. We have lot of challenges because it's new project and just initiated on November 2017. Some people might not understand why they want to use Agile, but the good thing that I'm seeing from the client is they're willing to invest time and money for the organization to adopt Agile with Scrum methodology.
One of the real action what client do is to conduct Agile training. It's held on last week, basically it's more to workshop or boot-camp, they allocate two days for the product owners, and another two days for the scrum master. Celcom hire Agile coach from IBM, his name is Marc, he's really inspirational, great coach, and some of his words somehow open up my mind. We had good time and nice experiences during the session.
Here's some of topic that I still remember until now:
- The truth belongs to no one.
- Marc asked one simple question "What color is the sky?", and different people have their own answer like blue, white, red, yellow, orange. And then he asked why we answer with it and he requested us to convince other people with different answer to agree with our answer.
- Lesson learned: basically when two people holding truth that they believe, people tend to not listen what other people talking about, he/she only hear other party just to reply back and push back with their believe. The key to overcome this situation is by letting go the ego, be open with any idea, and try to understand more from other people's perspective.
- You can't control others' act, but you can control your reaction to their act.
- During the lunch break, the scrum masters had some conversation with Marc, and there's one simple scenario given by him. Most of the time we will feel irritated when people don't get what we're trying to say or tell them, and we become frustrated. So I ask him what should we do about it then? Again, the key is to listen more and let go the ego to understand more on the other party. We can learn more how to become good listener, capturing what they need, so we can pass the information to them with more effective way.
- Never hold into something so badly.
- There's one question asked by Marc, "Are you afraid to lose your scrum master job now?", and funny thing all the scrum masters answer with NO. And he said, "Good, you should not afraid to lose your job, because when you're holding job so badly you will become people that not advancing your skills and abilities."
- When people not afraid to lose job, they know what they want, they have confident with their skill, and they believe that they will able to find other job easily outside. With other opportunity that value us or able to enhance our desired goals.
- Scrum Master is the enabler.
- As scrum master, we should acts as enabler, the facilitator for all parties (product owner, scrum team, other stakeholders) to make sure they communicate effectively to remove any blocker/impediment.
- We should not be a person that stuck in the middle of them, that answer or act on their behalf. Never tell them what to do, but always let the team to decide, self-organized, and act by themselves.
- And at the end, the key success indicator as Scrum Master is when the team don't need us anymore, when they know what they need to do and can perform well without our existence.
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