This was an amazing performance by Erin Perry of JP Morgan – last night, at NYC Large Scale Scrum meetup. The highest ever, record-high number of RSVP-ed people: (108) – since the meetup’s inception in, 2015.
Erin spoke about the ‘guerrilla agility’ approach that she has experimented with her colleagues, while coaching the organization, without even calling it ‘agile’. Before Erin dove into the journey of Scrum Master, being made into a full time role at JP Morgan, she demystified some most commonly known misconceptions about the role.
Erin spoke about the ‘guerrilla agility’ approach that she has experimented with her colleagues, while coaching the organization, without even calling it ‘agile’. Before Erin dove into the journey of Scrum Master, being made into a full time role at JP Morgan, she demystified some most commonly known misconceptions about the role.
This is what Erin shared with the crowd about the most commonly known misconceptions around Scrum Master role:
- “Mature teams don’t need a Scrum Master” — Erin brought up a great analogy from sports to explain why this is not true: “Athletes and musicians at the top of their game are surrounded by coaches and trainers. Why do we think our development teams will grow past the need of them?”
- “Scrum Master is an administrative role (that consists of maintaining JIRA,running the daily stand-ups, reporting in the scrum of scrums, and facilitating meetings)” — This is very commonly seen in organizations but it is wrong perception. Trivializing/reducing the role of Scrum Master to JIRA-Master-Admin is the sign of deep misunderstanding of Scrum, as a framework and and Scrum Master, as a role. Administrative tasks are best rotated through the team to allow the Scrum Master to focus on the deep coaching needs of the Product.This is frequently seen in companies that are trying to ‘fit agile’ in their otherwise archaic organisational design, without making much of an effort to change the ladder.
- “Scrum Masters are non-technical” – Although many great Scrum Masters are not fully capable coders, many very experienced and effective Scrum Masters are hands-on developers. Even if someone starts off as non-technical Scrum Master, it is great if that person has aspiration to learn new things and acquire some basic technical skills (especially, if Scrum is used in software development environments).
- “Scrum Master is a junior role” – Deriving from Erin’s talk, this is probably one of the biggest evils in the list of common misunderstandings about the role of Scrum Master. This critical misunderstanding alone, to a large extent, is also responsible for depreciation of Agile coaching profession in a market place. This is how: Scrum Masters are underpaid because companies don’t value the role high enough >>> Instead of honing their craft, as Scrum Masters, people try to ‘upgrade’ themselves (on a resume) to Agile Coaches too soon >>> under-qualified Agile coaches flood the market, get hired and set a low coaching bar for companies >>> coaching profession deteriorates further >>> companies stop seeing value in real, experienced organizational coaches >>>there is nobody, really, to provide good coaching and mentoring to existing Scrum Masters that are at the beginning of their career journey >>> Scrum Masters don’t ‘grow’ in their profession >>> Scrum Masters get frustrated with their role and low pay >>> and the cycle begins again…It’s the same dysfunction we saw in the last two decades with developers and the architect role. Scrum masters should become great scrum masters, not aspire to a “promotion” to agile coach.
- [Author’s note: This is what has produced so many Chief-Sheriffs-Power-Point Architects: individuals that tend to tell others what enterprise architecture should look like, without actually doing any hands-on development]
- Career path for Scrum Master inevitably requires climbing up the organizational ladder” – This is another huge misconception about Scrum Master role. Compensation and organizational seniority should not be coupled to to the pursuit of promotion to Coach, or Team Lead, or Manager. A person should be comfortable to build expertise in Scrum Master role, passionate about it, grow within the role, and an organization must provide a healthy habitat for this to be possible (providing fair compensation is one of key things). Erin stressed how this dilemma is swiftly addressed in Large Scale Scrum, where Scrum Master is viewed is a very senior and experienced role, whose focus changes over time. The difference between Scrum Master path Myth vs. Reality – is illustrated below.
This is how Erin has exposed some most common misconceptions about a career path of Scrum Master:
| Avoid This (Myth) | Try This (Reality) |
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It has been a great pleasure (and honor) to host Erin’s presentation to the LeSS community of NYC. Her views on Scrum Master role and career path are very much in line with my own and are strongly supportive of what is recommended in LeSS. The way Erin sees Scrum Master in LeSS (as a very seasoned, experienced and well-versed practitioner) and how sheelevates the role to the level of a team-level coaching, also brings back good memories of our past collaboration, when we together summarized, for the benefits of a global coaching community, what the role of agile coach should be (please, refer to 2015 “Agile Coaching – Lessons from the Trenches“)
Special thanks to Khalid Sultan, Raghu Raghunath and John Bradley for sharing their graphics and notes, and to Jim Dermend for his real-time tweets (below):
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