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Scrum Masters - Pair Coach with me

As a Scrum Master you are trying everything possible to help your team and the organization to become better at what they do. You help them to improve. You help them to understand how they create value and you help them to keep the customer in their focus.

The Scrum Challenge

One particular skill that is pretty important for Scrum teams is to be able to deliver a shipable product increment at the end of each sprint. The Scrum Guide says:

The Increment is the sum of all the Product Backlog items completed during a Sprint and the value of the increments of all previous Sprints. At the end of a Sprint, the new Increment must be “Done,” which means it must be in useable condition and meet the Scrum Team’s definition of “Done.” It must be in useable condition regardless of whether the Product Owner decides to actually release it.

Self-organization requires technical competence

There is the example of a submarine captain who was given command of the worst ship in the fleet. While he was in command the ship became one of the best and continues to be one of the best even though the captain is now someone else. He discovered:

One of the two pillars that support control is competence. Competence means that people are technically competent to make the decisions they make.

- L. David Marquet, Captain, U.S. Navy (retired), 2012, Turn the Ship Around!, Penguin Group, New York

Captain Marquet invested into technical education for the people under his command so that eventually he was able to delegate control to them and have them self-organize.

Let’s help people to grow technical competence

One of the five features of a Learning Organization is Personal Mastery. To gain mastery in a craft one needs to have an opportunity to learn from others outside the own shop. Learning from people outside the own shop helps to get to know new perspectives, discover new techniques and approaches to solving a problem, allows to see where the bar in the field is currently set at, and many other positive inspirations can come from it.

In my own work I’m like a little butterfly picking up techniques and methods all over the world. That allows me to apply and hone my technical skills in many different environments.

We can help your team together

You are the master of Scrum and I can help your team on their technical challenges. For example, I can sit with individual members of the team and pair program teaching test-driven development in difficult situations. I can help the testers come up with automation to free time for more meaningful tasks. I can be their technical sparrings partner to let them bounce technical ideas off of me. I can help them evaluate a new framework or other new technology or share my experience with a framework that I made elsewhere. There are many things in the technical area where I can support your work as Scrum Master.

As I have no interest in working myself as Scrum Master - my business is different - you can use me as a trusted partner to bring in for special occasions. Due to my long-term international experience we may even talk about your own challenges with the organization outside your Scrum team and I may be able to provide you some insights.

Are interested in working with me? Please drop me a note at sns@caimito.net to discuss how to get started.