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12.09.2010 What should I do next week?

Short term? We follow these markings.

As a Scrum Master for a fresh team I am in a void for a plan. I know there is a general direction I want to go to with my team. Yet we have not worked for a Sprint together. I do not know the specific requirements for this particular case for a team. When the team wasn’t formed, I had less of an idea. In that respect I am better off than two weeks ago. Since then we have made a rough action plan for the next four Sprints and tied some of the last loose ends from the previous teams.

That gives me a rough idea of the ways of the people. I have worked with all of them before for at least a little bit of time. For some it has been five months. I have never been a Scrum Master for them. Still I feel there are some new things uncovered all the time. The mindset of a Scrum Master is a bit different. When I work towards improvement in the team, the point of view is different. Previously getting a plan together was more important than how it was made.

I do not have the velocity of the team and I know already that the baseline will be different in every Sprint because of absences. They have not started with the stories yet so there is absolutely no evidence.

I should be terrified. When I was a team member I knew the plan better and had the rough idea of things I would bring up in the planning. There would be improvement ideas and some people I would need to catch for some piece of information. As a Scrum Master I have none of those. I know technical stuff the team is going to work with but this time I should be detached from the outcome.

However I am not terrified. Like it used to be okay for me not to know which team I would be working in in six months, I know that this is a part of the job description. There are no facts, yet. They are just starting to emerge. I know that there are certain meetings I will facilitate, one of which I could prepare an agenda for - the retrospective. The rest of my time is reserved for what ever comes up in those meetings. Usually those things will be impediments.

The way I see it, I am in a reactive line of work. The better plan I have for my next week, the more open issues there are from the last week. The reason we do Scrum in the team is that there are too many moving parts to make a long term plan that holds. My job is to handle what ever moving parts happen to get in the way of the team. As said, I have a long term vision and an ideal, however that ideal is secondary to keeping the short term clear of any bumps at all times.