“Is This Thing On?” — My Scrum Mic Check

How failing fast made me a better Scrum Master

“Okay, everybody, time for stand up!” I announced. Nobody moved.

There’s no feeling quite like realizing you are out of your depth. I hadn’t even heard the word “Scrum” 24 hours beforehand. I was spending time with the Infrastructure team to learn the ropes of AWS, so it came as a surprise when my manager invited me into her office to offer me the role of Scrum Master for the aforementioned team.

“They just need some organization, that’s all,” she had assured me. “The main office is starting to implement Scrum and want us to get on board. We want you to take the lead with the Infrastructure and Support team.”

Wait, what’s Scrum?

I was ecstatic. After accepting the offer, I thought of how great it would be to get some leadership experience. However, the next few days would shatter that enthusiasm, because I never stopped to think that I had no idea what Scrum was. Here I was now, with a disengaged team, halfway through their morning coffees, giving me blank stares.

“Stand up? What’s that?” One team member inquired, breaking the silence. I didn’t have a good answer.

“Well, we all need to report on what we’re doing to each other.” I explained.

“Why? I’m doing my job, that’s all you need to know.” another member said, turning back to his computer. The others began following suit.

After some convincing, the team begrudgingly followed me to the conference room. The event lasted easily over 30 minutes. We finally made it through, with nothing much gained but some added irritation. None of us had worked in a Scrum team before, and it showed. There were no Sprints, no Planning, no Reviews, no Retrospectives — only a broken Daily Standup that benefitted no one.

In the following days, the Standups would get longer and longer, quickly reaching over 45 minutes. The team insisted on sitting for the duration, which only exacerbated the issue. I brought this up with the team, who shrugged it off and sat down for another hour-long marathon. One particular occasion, I removed all chairs out of the little conference room we used. When 9:30am hit, the team came into the room, looked around, and then left to go find chairs to drag in. In the end, I suggested that we just give our updates asynchronously through Skype for Business, avoiding the root of issue.

To make matters worse, the management team wanted weekly reports written up by each team member, which were lengthy and cumbersome. To this day I am unsure what they were really for, and the team hated filling them out.

“You mean I have to give YOU a daily update, and MANAGEMENT a weekly update? That’s absurd! Why don’t you just compile all our daily updates and fill out our weekly reports for us!” the team responded. I agreed despite knowing it was not in anyone’s interest, and with that, I lost five hours each week to collating the team’s Standup notes into weekly reports.

Where do we go from here?

As the weeks went on, the team’s stress mounded, and with that stress came arguments. It got so out of hand, there were even threats of physical violence between two team members. I had officially lost the team.

I had failed in being a Scrum Master.

When that realization set in, I set out to discover what Scrum really was, where I went wrong, and how to avoid making the same mistakes I made back then. Over the next several years, I took classes, read countless articles, and found a Scrum coach. By failing fast, I was able to be humbled. By being humbled, I was able to learn with an open mind.

After some time, I began advocating for Agility within my company. When resistance was met, I found myself teaching. When things went wrong, I found myself coaching. As time went on, I gained confidence. I began giving demonstrations, hosting lunch-and-learns, and met individually with team members to instill the values of Scrum.

On the day I was again offered the role of Scrum Master, I knew I was ready. And when 9:30am struck on the following morning, just as I started to speak the words, I noticed that my team had already begun standing up.

Interested in learning more about my Scrum journey? Check out Water Agility to see my thoughts, tools, and materials that I use as a Scrum Master.