How I Failed As A Scrum Master For My Most Prestigious Team

Lessons learned from my latest experiences

You may know me as a writer of many Scrum articles, mainly for Serious Scrum (which I started with Sjoerd Nijland). I may often give you the impression that I think I know everything there is to know about Scrum and that I can apply this effortlessly myself. I have a confession to make. In my primary job, I have worked as a Scrum Master. And I failed in my job with my most prestigious team. So much so that I apologised to this great bunch of people.

By Counselling art Pixabay

Here is the account of how all of this happened.

The promising start

I believe that we started well. Everyone in the team — except for me and the Product Owner — was new to the company. But we had an inspiring objective: we would build a new real-time reporting product from scratch.

We had a great kick-off which was the first Sprint Planning. We established a couple of important things like:

• our mission — at the end of the event we had a great mission statement that we all agreed upon;
• skills assessment — we identified the skills that we thought were required to fulfill our mission and uncovered some gaps. For these gaps we created a plan with an approach for how…