As Agilists1, we hug trees because we’re screwing them by using that amount of Post-Its2.
Original Spanish quote: Los agilistas abrazamos árboles porque les estamos dando en la madre con tantos Post-Its.
Heard it around Mexico City at the XI Latin American Agile Journeys.
I noticed how it’s easy to assume we’re doing something useful, but in fact we’re only satisfying our need to be helpful without providing any actual help.
You may ask “what is it that you do that should be helpful but isn’t?”3.
Well, I’m currently a Scrum Master4 for Walmart.
I used to be a full-time developer for POS satellite systems until I figured out I could do a great job as a Scrum Master. It was a matter of few chats until they gave me the role.
Of course I wanted to eat the Scrum Masters’ world by implementing all sorts of fun stuff I read about, dynamics, hand-made dashboards, even changing the Scrum ceremonies to make them fun for the developers.
Sounds like cool, right?
Well, sort of. Because of my personality, I get to make people enthusiastic about new ideas and they easily follow my steps to a new enterprise of a new method or whatever I am proposing. So when people’s enthusiasm for your ideas foster positive changes, everything is cooler than awesome; but when your ideas are not leading to a real change, passion is then swapped to merciless apathy.
Thing is, most of the new ideas I had to improve the development process were born thanks to my desire of becoming a great Scrum Master instead of helping my team, which is the main purpose of such a role. You can imagine by now that most of my team fell into feeling the passion of a rock for the process.
They weren’t very keen to follow it in the first place. I should’ve known better, I was a developer a short time ago; but I didn’t see it coming.
I then realized that developers like me, rather be developing than attending game-disguised meetings, typing code than filling eye-catching-hand-made status forms.
This epiphany made me think of all the times I did the same thing in other contexts of my life. So I decided to write about it, not only to share it, but also to give it a useful structure, a tool if you will, and avoid falling again.
This site is about how I discovered this huge mistake, not only from myself but also from some of my fellow Scrum Masters, and how you get to solve this; not only from the Scrum Master perspective, but on all contexts that I clearly figure out are needed.
Hope you enjoy it.
Rick.
- Disciples of the Agile discipline which is generally viewed as a hippy approach to product management.
- It is a common practice to use Post-Its (sticky notes) to depict tasks and move them along a board to declare the current status of that task.
- Please ask.
- Someone that takes care of the Software development process; should be taking out development blockers