Last week (9 – 11 February 2015 we attended the Scrum Coach Retreat in South Africa. Sam found herself in a group that was focussed on the ScrumMaster journey.
Our team had 4 people in it: myself, Arthur, Nadine and Heidi. Our vision was a simple one:
We aim to guide and inspire Scrum Masters on their learning journey.
We started by brainstorming everything we thought ScrumMasters should know, including books, videos, blogs etc. After about 50 cards full of ideas we thought about how we wanted the ScrumMasters to use this information. We realised that we had a few personas in mind and so created two to keep us on track.
This gave us the idea to structure this journey as a story map. We decided on 4 overarching topics: Process, Coaching, Training and Facilitation. And within those areas we looked at what a ScrumMaster at various levels would need to learn (according to us).
The levels we decided on were:
- Shu – beginner, learning, follow the rules (less than 6 months experience)
- Ha – applying knowledge to teams (6 months + experience)
- Ri – working outwards with the greater organisation and community (working on becoming an agile coach)
Here is an outline of the board we came up with:
Each Index card is a topic and then we fleshed them out with the pink stickies – which are books, courses, blogs etc to gain the skills on the index card.
Next we needed to think how to make this accessible to ScrumMasters all over the world. Ideally we would have liked these to be cards they could print and create their own big visible board with. This way they can show their team(s) what they are working on as well as their boss! If you’ve ever been a ScrumMaster you will know that it is very difficult to explain how much you need to learn and why – this board will help! We had limited time at the retreat though, so we decided instead to put everything on a public Trello board. This way you can copy the board and keep it just for yourself. You can still print it out and share it with your team!
Here is our final product – The ScrumMaster Skeleton!
Go here: https://trello.com/b/2Hx5dNlB
In order to customise the board for your own personal use:
- Click “Show Sidebar” on the right hand side of the page
- Select “Copy Board…”
- Rename the “Title” to whatever you would like
- Change “Organisation” to whatever you would like
- Change the board to be “Private”, unless you would like it to be discoverable in Google searches
- Click “Create”
We hope you like our idea and we hope it is useful – PLEASE share this with all the ScrumMasters you know 🙂