Answers to Divya: biggest challenge faced as Scrum Master

me better than monkeys

Divya is a LinkedIn connection of mine. She asked a couple of questions regarding the scrum master role.

Having a lot of question from communities, I decided to share my thoughts, insights to help those who are to shy to ask.

My apologies goes to my company for sharing my knowledge for free. That’s my fault. I am still stuck in the old belief of sharing, and I am too stubborn to change.

What is the biggest challenge faced as Scrum Master?

I will avoid to come with a typical consulting answer “it depends”, and I will instead come with my top five. There is not one challenge but a collection of challenges with light differences and, because I am an European, I will obviously writing about the painful challenges.

1. Lack of recognition: you have to accept to not be recognized for your hard work and to continously explain the value you are creating for the company. Because, you are not directly involved with the craft and mostly in charge with communication and coordination (even if science explains that failure is mostly coming from lack of communication), you will be the first to get fired in a crisis. In team sports, you understand that the coach is critical but in business it is different (sarcastic).
2. Highjacking the definition: it is very annoying to discover that your customers are highjacking the names. As example, a scrum master is someone who masters scrum, it isn’t someone who paid 150$ to get a certification online. A User story needs a user obviously. A scrum team has all the necessary skills to deliver potentially shippable increment of work: potentially doesn’t mean work that you handover to another testing team. And, the last, if 99% of you work is scrum based, don’t call it SaFE.
3. Making compromises: my compromises are in fact good when it’s based on a negotiation. It is not good when it is imposed to you and you have to accept it because you are agile. Making such compromises are annihilating your ability to say no: no, we don’t stop doing agile because development is completed and we are starting testing phase; no, we don’t make a three weeks sprint instead of two weeks because it’s Christmas; no, it is not scrum because the boss is running all the meetings as a one-woman show; no, we can’t start without a vision; no, increasing profit and reducing costs is not a vision.
4. Losing the ear of your sponsor: when you become your mandate as a scrum master, everything is fine and you are start moving forward. The team(s) and stakeholders are engaged, happy and everything works like in a book. Then, you have to tackle the biggest challenge of reshapping your organization. For that part, you can’t handle it alone and you have to get closer to your sponsor. Then, you discover that your sponsor has more important stuff to do than connecting with you. Everything you is running fine, what should he/she care, it’s running fine. It is also another symptom, all the “business as usual” work of your sponsor is covered and please do not try to change that executive level. This is fine, but annoying but you are branded execution and you have to handover that part to someone without such branding.
5. Executive consultants distracting the stakeholders: you know that loud guy coming from a prestigious consulting company, with a PhD, using all the nice words, dressing codes, but just talking crap. Because he masters that cool marketing attitude, nobody listen to you and you become part of the furnitures. That guy tricks so well that even you if you tell that a PhD in Theology, no agile background, that you were part of a more prestigious consulting company, and that you met already ten other people having lead the ING transformation, you have only one option to shut up a wait.

These are my top five, coming out my gut.

Pierre