With our captain, Adam Ulery, out sick, Julee Belomo and Christy Erbeck took the wheel and kept us on course for this month’s meeting topic: Fostering Strong Teams. We also had delicious food and dessert courtesy of Clearly Agile.
Helping teams learn to work together can be the most challenging part of a ScrumMaster’s job. In this month’s exercise, we gathered in groups of four or five and considered how to help the team in one of three scenarios.
- A “cowboy” developer who does what he thinks is best, without consulting the team.
- A team that limps along, mediocre but unwilling to use retrospectives for continuous improvement.
- A development team member who, after being promoted to manager, remains part of the team but runs roughshod over them.
All three scenarios reflected real world problems that many ScrumMaster grapple with, and each group generated a lot of food for thought as to how to handle them, and situations like them.
Each scenario also each hinted at something awry at the core of the organization’s Agile practices–it might be worth revisiting them to go beyond, “How do we help the team,” to, “How do we guide the organization to improve its agility?”
We closed out the meeting by soliciting suggestions for the May meeting topic and asking everyone to vote.
At next month’s meeting, on April 6, we will celebrate the Guild’s one year anniversary. Don’t miss it!
Sam Falco 