Imagine showing up to work whenever you felt like it. You know what to work on because you signed up for the project. Your day-to-day work results from brainstorming sessions with your team, and you work hard to accomplish great things together. You feel proud of your work; you understand how that work contributes to the company's mission. You work your hardest but you have a life outside of work. You understand the market and how it moves. And yet you are free—if you hear of another cool initiative from your friends at lunch, you are free to join it. Anytime! Your colleagues work with you in the same building. Everyone on a team sits next to each other. When you move to a different team, someone moves all your stuff overnight and rebuilds your workstation in that new team's area. You don't have to think about it. In some cases, you have no CEO. In these cases, everyone works together and shares the wealth. A back-office staff pays the bills, keeps the books...
Here's the Agile Manifesto, (visit www.agilemanifesto.org) again—the statement that started the Agile movement back in 2001:
Tip
Individuals and interactions over process and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
I believe we can drop the stuff on the right, along with its final statement. Forget it—we're moving past that now. Focus on people, great products, the customer, and change. The other stuff will bog down the organization and corrupt people's mind-set. The items on the right are mainstays of the 80s and 90s—process was led by those ideas. Well, those decades are long gone. Even though the emphasis is this over that, even mentioning the that keeps it fresh in our minds. Know that process, tools, documents, and contracts will live in the background...
As I'm writing this chapter, we're a few weeks from a big presidential election. On the right, we have a conservative who believes in the spirit of the individual—capitalism, American dream, and small, limited government. On the left, we have a liberal who believes in redistributing wealth—that everyone deserves a fair share, even if that means taking from others. It's an extreme example of the battle of small or large government, to put it simply. I lean toward keeping government small. It should come as no surprise, then, that I feel the same way about management in organizations.
The knowledge worker has his talents and skills inside his brain. He takes his brain with him from job to job, from employer to employer. He wants to know that he contributes and that his team and his organization value him. He does his best work when he's surrounded by smart people who challenge him. He wants to be left alone at times in order to focus, yet needs interaction...
Modern organizations embrace iterations as experiments—after all, that's what they are. They apply the scientific method of building a hypothesis and an approach to the solution (iteration planning), testing it out (iteration work), and concluding with "Was it right?" or "Was it wrong?" (iteration acceptance).
Each iteration for each of your teams holds within it some new discovery. The modern organization properly sets the stage so that teams can chase ideas. The organization also provides a mechanism for discoveries to percolate through the organizational froth. Modern organizations view their people—and their brains—as their number one asset! Modern organizations provide mechanisms for new ideas to surface and provide space for those ideas to be chased. By doing so, these modern organizations are successful not by cutting costs every quarter to increase the stock price, but by bringing cool products and releases to market to entice customers. Some of these...
In the modern organization, we all become ScrumMasters—keepers of lean thinking, craftsmen of fine products, liaison to customers. As a ScrumMaster, make your organization the very best it can be, and don't stop trying until you know in your heart that you've done all that you could. You are a change agent, after all, the way Ken and Jeff intended.
Peter Drucker stated this idea so eloquently so long ago, and I consider it a fine way to end this book. I hope you have found some inspiration as you work your way toward becoming a Professional ScrumMaster:
Once the individual understands the system of profound knowledge, he will apply its principles in every kind of relationship with other people. He will have a basis for judgment of his own decisions and for transformation of the organizations that he belongs to. The individual, once transformed, will:
Set an example;
Be a good listener, but will not compromise;
Continually teach other people; and
Help people to pull away...
© 2013 Packt Publishing Limited All Rights ReservedAuthor (1)
