Posts Tagged scrummaster
Impediment Colored Glasses
Posted by David Bland in agile, lean, scrum, scrumban on November 19, 2011
impediment – a hindrance or obstruction in doing something: “an impediment to progress”.
When you are an acting ScrumMaster or Agile Project Manager, it is common to seek out impediments so that you can help to remove them. Before you know it, impediments seem to be all around you ranging from the individual, team and organizational levels. A person can quickly feel consumed and overwhelmed by this new found responsibility.
A few years ago I was having a conversation with a colleague about all of the impediments I’d uncovered and how I needed to remove them as soon as possible. About half way through the conversation he interjected “These are not impediments, these are merely the tasks we need to complete our user stories”.
Then it dawned on me, I was so focused on removing impediments that I had begun to view our tasks as blockers to progress.
I was wearing impediment colored glasses…. [Read More]
Distributed ScrumMasters Update
Posted by David Bland in agile, scrum on March 30, 2011
It has been over a year since I first gave my Distributed ScrumMasters talk to friends & coworkers around Washington, DC. Since then I’ve learned quite a bit about myself, how I speak publicly and what people are most concerned about with Distributed Scrum. After careful consideration, inspecting and adapting I have updated my original [...]
And Now You Are Just a Project Manager
Posted by David Bland in agile, certification, jobs, scrum on October 25, 2010
You’ve seen the job description:
Project Manager / ScrumMaster
- Must have knowledge of traditional project management
- CSM preferred
- PMP nice to have
These are becoming more and more common as of late, and typically posted by 3rd party recruiters working on behalf of large enterprise organizations.
What they fail to mention in the description is how once their agile adoption fails, you’ll be a full time Project Manager
… [Read More]
A Mirror for the Team
Posted by David Bland in agile, facilitation, retrospectives, scrum on July 20, 2010
Alistair Cockburn once stated that Scrum is a mirror, and that organizations need to look into the Scrum mirror no matter how difficult it may be.
I would take that a step further and say that the ScrumMaster is the mirror for the team.
A team often unintentionally falls back into situations in which they’ve previously committed to improving.
For example, let’s say that in the last iteration retrospective the team decided that they need to expand the ownership of each story. The last iteration was a success, yet it seemed as though they were not collaborating effectively. Each user story had one developer doing most, if not all of the assigned tasks… [Read More]
ScrumMasters Now Earn More Money Than Project Managers
Posted by David Bland in jobs, scrum, trends on June 11, 2010
According to the latest data from Indeed.com, the annual salary of a ScrumMaster now surpasses that of a Project Manager.
Even more surprising, is just how quickly the ScrumMaster salaries have increased in such a short amount of time. As you may remember, I performed similar job research in Oct 2009 when the ScrumMaster role pulled in around $88,000 a year.
ScrumMasters now make on average $95,000 a year, which is a $7,000 increase.
On the other hand, Project Manager salaries seem to have become stagnant… [Read More]
