Ryan Brook

The Professional Scrum Master training is designed to help Scrum Masters (or those who want to become one). So what do you do if you want to learn Professional Scrum, but don't want to become a Scrum Master?

Many new Scrum Masters need help to gain facilitation skills to leverage the potential of diverse perspectives within their team. By improving facilitation, it should also help to improve the interactions within Scrum events and also improve participatory decision making. The purpose of this blog post is to dispel some myths around facilitation, namely what it is and who does it. It will also provide some top tips to immediately improve your facilitation skillset. 

Professional Teaching is a complex skill that requires practitioners to probe, sense and respond to a changing learning environment. As Scrum Masters, we are naturally at home within complexity, and therefore the ability to apply empiricism to learning should be simple.

We all have strengths and weaknesses with the preferred stances of a Scrum Master. Like many of the teams we work with, being ‘key-shaped’ comes to mind – cross-skilled and competent at many things but having a deeper knowledge of certain stances more so than others.

Here's my twist on an old classic. If I've learnt anything by writing this, it's that I should stick to training Scrum and not writing poetry! 'Twas the night before Sprint Review, when all through the building Not a dev was there stirring, definitely not out chilling; The increment had been tagged on the Ops branch with care, In hopes that the stakeholders soon would be there; Most of the Scrum Team were all snug in their beds; While visions of acceptance criteria danced in their heads; The Product Owner whistled, alongside a Scrum Master clap, For they had just finished prepping a forecasted roadmap, When out in the pipeline there arose such a clatter, I sprang from my desk to see what was the matter. Away to the command line I flew like a flash, Sudo’d the Jenkins and entered my hash. The logs on the page of the new-tailed error, Gave the lustre of screw up, and Product Goal terror, When what to my wondering eyes did appear, But a missed carriage return, oh how they’re unclear, When a little old DBA so lively and quick, I knew in a moment he would give it a kick. More rapid than eagles his PRs they came, As he committed, and pushed, and called them by name: "Now, SQL! now, Java! now Angular and Bash! On, Python! on, Perl! on, C# and Stash! To the top of the class! to the top of the call! Now merge away! merge away! merge away all!" As code changes that before the wild Sprint Review fly, When they meet with a conflict, mount to the sky; So up to the repo the developer flew With a brain full of ideas, and hard resets, too— And then, in a moment, he got a little impatient Till he heard the whirring of a tiny little agent. As he drew in his head, and was checking the build, From the server his joyfulness truly was filled. He was dressed all in denim, from his head to his foot, The codebase was tarnished and almost caput; Of a bundle of value he had just got control, And he cheered like a child when he met the Sprint Goal. His code—how it sparkled! his comments, best all year! His rebases were awesome, finally his diff was clear! His droll little mouth was drawn like an array, Because of the outcomes he’d delivered, and he’d done it his way; The Definition of Done he’d met and exceeded, But the pressure it caused, damn! His hair had receded; He had a broad smile and a little round belly, Caused by too many Greggs, and trips to the deli. He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old engineer, But he was certainly magical, there’s no argument here; A wink of his eye and a groupadd for his name Soon gave me to know we were one and the same; He spoke not a word, but made his progress apparent, Into Jira he typed, his changes transparent. He picked up a pen, and to his colleagues wrote a note, He logged out of his terminal, and threw on his coat. He sprang to his car, to his engine gave a whistle, And away he then flew, for fear of dismissal. Then I rushed to his desk, I read the note, alright?— “Happy Sprint Review to all, and to all a good night!” Ryan is the primary trainer at Optilearn. He is an experienced Scrum Master, Agile Coach and educator. He is a Professional Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org and also holds Qualified Teacher Status in the UK. Ryan believes that the best teachers are the ones who practise what they teach, and so he maintains active consultancy to constantly put theory into practice. To check out his upcoming classes, please look here.

What drives you to achieve? Money? Promotion? Skill mastery? Whatever it is that motivates you, that’s okay — be thankful that you are motivated to move forwards. Without motivation in any form, you can personally and professionally stagnate to a point where you become a detractor in a team environment. This blog will explore how to avoid falling into that trap and some of the common dysfunctions it causes.

The past 18 months have been a whirlwind. Coronavirus, elections, inequality and conflict – a quagmire of micro and macro complexities that impact the feelings and behaviours of Scrum Teams. In my opinion, it would be fair to say that teams who consistently attempt to mitigate environmental and sociological complexities are ones that thrive. It is the purpose of this blog to explore how some Scrum Teams have successfully done this in an age of remote working by focusing on one thing – the Scrum Values.

Being a Product Owner is tough. Having the accountability for maximising value can sometimes feel like a huge weight is on your shoulders and sometimes - it's hard to know where to begin. As a Scrum Master, you’re accountable for helping to establish empirical product planning – but how could you do that? Optilearn have created a visualisation to help.