Diving deeper into Scrum
In the last two weeks there have been some additional events concerning my current role as a ScrumMaster for a development team. Both events have been trainings which were targeted not only but also for ScrumMasters. The first training was an internal one which was intended for ScrumMasters and Performance Managers (an internal role which is comparable to a coach for employees). This one was just an afternoon and quite relaxed because the trainers partly internal employees and was concentrating more on the psychological side of coaching and mentoring activities.
The second training was the more intensive one. It was lasting for three days and was performed by Boris Gloger who is THE professional Scrum trainer in Europe. He founded his consulting company bor!isgloger to spread Scrum and help organisations in implementing this methodology.
Performing the training with Boris was a refreshing experience. In our company we are already working using Scrum for quite some years. But I always had the feeling that some things did not work very well and that a few problems we experienced were caused by inconsistencies in our implementation of Scrum. Yet I could not name or pinpoint the exact causes. In our training with Boris we gained a lot of new insight into "our" methodology and we realized at least some of the difficulties which we are dealing with on a daily basis. To be fair, I think none of our problems poses a serious threat for any of our running projects. Nevertheless they limit our efficiency and effectivity when dealing with our work and on some occasions we're already hitting the borders of what we're currently capable of.
One of those problems affects me personally. A ScrumMaster should be a ScrumMaster for 100% of the time and within Scrum different roles should not be executed by a single person. Which is what I'm currently doing, I'm ScrumMaster and developer within my team. This makes it hard to stay objective on our work and also causes some more organizational problems.
This does all but smoothen the dillema I've already mentioned last time. In the meantime I received additional compliments for my work as a ScrumMaster for the new team which tells me that I'm doing that job not that bad. But if I really would try to improve my performance as a ScrumMaster it would result in having to give up my software development activity completely and concentrate on the development, guidance and coaching of the team.
Still no answer in sight for me....