6 tips when starting as a Scrum Master at new organisation
1. Listen! and observe your new team
Start by listening (we all have preconceived notions but it is key to listen first).
Watch, listen, observe and understand where they are at right now. Respect their current approaches and working arrangements.
What I personally typically do, is just to listen the first week or two. Write things down that you feel are worthy of it, don’t directly start coaching or teaching or whatever from the get-go.
Figure out what they’re trying to achieve, take a look into the way they develop the product, and so on. Start working from there :)
2. Get to know the members of the team
Set up some one-on-ones with each team member.
Reach out to the teams you’re going to work with; show a genuine interest and ask about themselves. If you have a chance to have lunch, breakfast, a walk would be good though. Read the situation. Feel the dynamics, read the room, talk to people individually, ask them questions.
When you talk with the team members, make sure you ask about their feelings towards the product. Do they love it? Do they feel engaged? Are they a part of the discovery? Or is it just another list of work items?
You might ask the questions below during one-on-one;
- How long have you been with the team?
- Know the skills (FE, BE, QA)
- How happy are you in your current situation, is there anything you wish to change?
- Is there something that you’ve wanted to kind of solution for a while?
- What is your expectation from Scrum & SM?
It is important to get feedback from a team when you step into a new culture
3. Hold Team Building Activities
- Hold fun/game events (helps break the ice and brings teams together) — anything that brings the teams closer and have them see that you’re human too are great in helping you all work toward the same goal(s).
- Schedule team-building exercises, like an online, live Trivia Game.
“If you’re not having fun in the team, there’s a problem somewhere.” — Dan Neumann
4. Create a team working agreement
When you talk to team members, try to understand the rules and norms they already agreed upon.
As a Scrum Master, you lead by adhering to the collaboratively developed and mutually accepted rules and values of the team.
It shouldn’t be you who holds team members accountable to meet the shared norms and values, but you should be the one who facilitates a flourishing atmosphere where team members care about their culture and hold each other accountable towards shared goals and norms.
Do they have a written working agreement? If not then maybe this is something you can work with them to start thinking about bringing transparency to how the team would like to work with each other.
If they already have a working agreement in place, organize a retrospective session where they can explain the evolution of their rules, and review and update the agreement together.
5. Observe Scrum Events, and actions from Sprint Retrospective
Observe their current Scrum implementation, and how they collaborate with each other during Scrum events. Take notes down to improve and discuss.
Learn about the team’s improvement backlog and what they are working on right now.
You can ask previous SM or dev lead about their previous Sprint Retrospective topics/ actions. You will have a chance to learn how happy the team is, and what does team suffer from.
6. Understand what agility means for the organization
Check if they are familiar with Scrum or if you need to talk about certain things beforehand. Training on Agile can come after and will happen more naturally once they know you.
Check the Agile Mindset Enablers in your team or organisation
- Demonstrate culture change
— Be transparent :
Transparency is an incredibly helpful tool. Just having a Scrum Board doesn’t make a Scrum Team’s progress transparent. What really counts for transparency is having better conversations, frequently enough and with the right people, that lead to a shared understanding.
— Don’t treat People as resources
- Redefine Success Criteria
— Focus on Delivery of Value
— Ask for the Right information
— Bring accountability at Team level.
- Encourage continuous improvement
— Enable fast and regular feedback
— Encourage positive disruptions
— Celebrate success
- Make changes at org. level
— Modify appraisal process
— Have people friendly policies
— Align the entire organization
- Address middle management insecurities & concerns
— Help bring out in open
— Help them to visualize the benefits of their new role
— Pair with transformed managers
Those are just my tips so they might not be right or you might not agree with them all. You might have some better ideas so if you do, please do share in the comments.
Further Reading:
Check out the fantastic YouTube series of Your Daily Scrum videos
Thank you for reading!
