Agile Training Toronto - Kanban, Lean, Scrum Coach » ScrumMaster http://agilitrix.com Helping you grow your organization... Fri, 18 May 2012 13:43:58 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Customer Team Helps Product Owners Survive http://agilitrix.com/2010/03/product-owner-and-customer-team/ http://agilitrix.com/2010/03/product-owner-and-customer-team/#comments Sat, 20 Mar 2010 04:40:46 +0000 Michael Sahota http://www.agilitrix.com/?p=725 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> Part of my standard training for Product Owners is to help them understand how they relate to everyone else in an Agile/Scrum world. Hence the drawing below.

Project Community Diagram

The Product Owner is not part of the team since their role is to ask for more to keep productive tension in the system. I like the way Ron Jeffries narrates about the Product Owner Role without ever using the term. This is a good story. So is the follow-up one.

I like the XP notion of the customer team to reflect the group representing the customers interests. (If anyone can suggest a good link/definition, I’ll add it.)

Why is the ScrumMaster outside? Their primary role is to act outside of the system to help it function and grow. Why is the ScrumMaster cheering on top? Ooops. That’s a bug. If I had time to re-draw, I’d put them underneath holding up the whole system as a servant leader.

So what do you do, if you don’t like the way I have parsed the world? Please help me understand your perspective – draw a picture to show me the world through your eyes.

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]]> http://agilitrix.com/2010/03/product-owner-and-customer-team/feed/ 2 ScrumMaster can be a tough job http://agilitrix.com/2009/09/scrummaster-tough-job/ http://agilitrix.com/2009/09/scrummaster-tough-job/#comments Sat, 19 Sep 2009 20:21:58 +0000 Michael Sahota http://www.agilitrix.com/?p=226 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> I’m writing about a talk given by Paul Hodgetts at Agile 2009 called “ScrumMasters Considered Harmful – Where Did We Go Wrong?” (Link to full presentation).

So, why doesn’t the title of this blog post match?  The title is really catchy, but the the talk was more of an investigation and discussion of what the ScrumMaster role really entails.  Check out the Mind Map below.

scrum-masters-good-or-bad

Some of the interesting things to note are that there are a lot of roles that a ScrumMaster is supposed to take on if you are following Scrum – see the green checkmarks.  (If you are not following Scrum – why do you have a ScrumMaster? ;-)  Anyway, it’s a tough job!

One hot area  is around the role of Project Manager or Task Master – there is often a management expectation that they will play this role.  I have seen this many times.  Hint: a better answer is that work needs to come through the Product Manager and that the team is un-interrupted for the duration of the Sprint.  But every situation is different, so there is no always in this.

On the left in purple, can be seen a number of candidates for taking on the role of ScrumMaster.  It can be a tough role to fill.

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