AA105 - Where Have All the Scrum Masters Gone?

I know what I want the title of the podcast to be, which is where are all the good Scrum masters? Where have all the scrum masters gone? Oh, I guess I should do an intro. welcome back to Arguing Agile. where have all the good scrum masters gone on the unemployment line? why are they on the unemployment line? are, are they are the good Scrum masters on the unemployment line? Is that where they really are? let's dig into this for a second. I wanna know what makes a good scrum master. I want to know if what I'm seeing on TikTok and YouTube telling me that I can be a scrum master and all my dreams have come true and make six figures and I don't need any experience. I can just walk. I wanna know if all that stuff is true. yeah, there's, there's quite a few Scrum masters in the unemployment line that are good cuz we started with, you know, where have all the goods Scrum masters gone., but there's also quite a few there. Or perhaps, how can I put this kindly? Not so good. Not good. Yeah. Right. And that's because they took their lead from social media sites like TikTok, , whatever you have. They go to these things and they consume stuff that they see there , in all earnestness. Is that a word? Uh, anyway, they consume it seriously. Right? They take it seriously. Ayo is back on the podcast today to talk about scrum master things. He finally invited me it's always more than meets the eye, right? So this is, this goes deeper than just that superficial slice. let's dig into the first question. Okay. I, I saw a lot of videos today. I surfed a lot of TikTok today. Do you surf TikTok? I, I feel, you can't surf it if it's forcibly being served to you. Served to you. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I, I've been served a lot of bad. TikTok today, that tells me that I can be a successful scrum master and make six figures with a two day certification that cost me a couple hundred bucks and 2 99. And no, and no, no experience. So what, what's, what's your hot take on that? And please don't make me defend this. Well, you know, it, it is. You get what you, what you get. I mean, you go to a restaurant like that, you get served things at you, right? Like you need a different restaurant. TikTok has no filters. Like you can just put up whatever you like there. Nobody's validating it, nobody's challenging it. Just like real life. Just like real life.. So you got these people saying, that's a good thing. Buy my certification class at 299. And you'll get a job tomorrow. Not tomorrow. Cause it's two days. Yeah. Two days from now you'll get a job that will pay you 150,000 enticing for those that enter the field. Oh, by the way, don't worry, if you have no experience, you don't need it. I'll teach you everything you need to know and then you'll have that certification. New brandish in front of recruiters, right? Yeah. So there's a lot of that bad scrum, information. I was gonna say bad advice. Bad advice, bad career advice. Definitely bad advice. Bad, bad life coaching. Be careful where you shop. I guess our coach. so I two, my two follow up questions. Why are there so many, I don't know if you really answered any of my questions, but that I didn't. The why are there so many of them? Number one, why are there so many of them? And number two, if they're all like peddling wares, are there really that many people buying? that, that to, to prop up in a whole industry like this. There are, why There's so many, why do you I, I think there are, I think there are a lot of, because I do know of a lot of people who are doing it. So, because ever since the covid and everything, people want to do something different. People wanna make more money and do less. Mm. So it all depends on how they are peddling it. Cause mostly app peddling it as, Hey, just like I said, you don't have to have a degree, you don't have to know nothing. I would teach you everything you need to know, and you're gonna make this amazing money. So who would not buy that? If you were not where you are now and someone says, I'm gonna guarantee. You're gonna get a job paying you one 10 to one 50 knowing nothing but what I just taught you, no degrees. Cuz before in order to get a job making 80,000, you have to get a master's. Now you don't even need a community college, AS or AA degree. I teach you in two days for 300 bucks. Actually 2 99, 99 or penny less. I was gonna say, I don't know, I don't know where all these certifications are. My, my certification was way more expensive than 2 99. Yes. If I was gonna do that for you, what's there to lose. But 2 99, right? If you lose 2 99 and you get a job, fine. If you lose 2 99, you don't get a job. That's also fine. Right. So you're making a very compelling case. I'm I'm almost bought into this and I hang up, buy his credit card next. That's right. You watch. It's the old promise though, right? You know, it's like anything it used to have these years ago too. You know, buy my course right? Real estate or you know, investments. Right. Buy my course and you'll be a millionaire in two months, three months. Oh yeah. Buy my course only 1500 bucks. Network marketing, same thing. It's quite 200 network marketer. Right? That's that network marketing scheme. Yeah. Mlm. This running burnt carbs. No it doesn't burn cars. Is this the same thing as that dude on YouTube being like running doesn't burn cars. I was like, I, I think running burns everything. I think it just, if you just keep running like Forrest Gump, I think you'll lose weight. Definitely will. I don't know. I think it does work, man. Like I, I'm gonna push back against that. Well that was well thanks for coming to the podcast, . We figured we figured it out running Burns calories. If 2 99 gave you co blanche to go into an organization and practice Scrum Mastery, you are in for a rude awakening. When you do get that job, if you get that job right, you're not gonna be able to successfully do anything because you've just had, you know, two days of dubious quality stuff thrown at you. Um, and then you are given this piece of paper that practically is worth nothing. Well, it's worth 2 99 to you, I guess, cuz you, that's what you shouted out for it. Mm-hmm. I doubt if there's a good ROI on it, to be honest. If my team were to hire a scrum master, right? And then it was like, Brian, congratulations. You're getting a scrum master. The things that I would be looking for and the things that Look, forget, forget Brian, the product manager, Brian, the leader in an organization, right? The business leader. I'm looking for someone to come in who has skill and experience uh, understanding how to break up, how to vertically slice things. And break up large things into small things. I could, I could say breaking, you know, large stories into whatever, but let's just call it vertical slicing for now. Break large things into small things. Oh, right. They understand that a little bit. They understand how to influence management. They understand the basics of change management, or organizational change Management may be org design. Maybe they've dipped their toes in organism, read a couple books or something like that, at least can talk in, you know, about org design. They understand what the cost of delay is and why it's important. They understand ROI at a basic, not even an MBA level at a basic high level. They understand roi. They understand the basics of budgeting, right? Because if you're gonna turn to scrum master here, here's, here's where I'm, I'm going with these skills. If you're gonna turn a scrum master into a junior PM and you're gonna strip away all of the leadership core of the role, all of the servant leadership, you're gonna strip all that out because you don't trust the teams with that. These are the things I need out of someone at the team level. I need someone that, that knows all this stuff cuz my developers they might not know this stuff. They might not have time to break out and learn these skills. It'd be good for them in their career if they do. But it'd be better if I have somebody who's now can focus on one of these things at a time and get better at it and make the whole team better. And then move on. I don't think there's anything I listed that you get out of the cert, out of the two day class. Maybe vertical slicing, maybe they talk about that in, I think they talk about that in the base level cSM or pr, I don't know what they do on psm. Yeah. I mean certainly that, that's, that's true. They're not covering all of those things in a two day class. Cuz two days is just not long enough to do all that. Well, it's not that they're not covering, they're not introducing any of these concepts. They can't, there's no space, there's no time., right? In a two day class, you're just focusing on the basics of Scrum. That's all you're doing really. So if you are hiring a scrum master and you want those things that you highlighted out of them, are you making, are you giving them the responsibility and more importantly the authority, right. To execute on those things? Or are you just simply saying, you're a junior pm you go do all of these things and what have you come back with? Doesn't really matter to us, cuz we know what you, what we want you to do. Mm-hmm.. Right? You're just essentially there to check boxes. Mm-hmm., as long as you say yes to what we say you shouldn't be doing. Mm-hmm., you're a great scrum master. Yeah., I'm sure people have seen that organization and say, how about this? And they go, that won't work here. Yeah. This is what you need to do. This is what we've, this is how we work. Let's just take all my whole list of things. If you're not doing any of those things, what are you doing? just being a yes person, right? Yep, yep. That's what you're doing. Definitely. And the minute you kind of slightly even argue against that, you are rebelling and they don't want you. What is your job? Is your job akin to like an executive assistant for the team then at that point? You schedule the meetings when they tell you to schedule meetings, you track down a person. When they tell you to track down a person, put their stuff on the screen when they need something put on the screen. That's exactly what this is this is an admin role, effectively. Exact that, that title you mentioned as exactly what a lot of companies have dumbed down a scrum master to be an executive assistant. And that's why, our last topic of what does a scrum master do? That's pretty much what people look at it as. And when they look at that, they're like, you know what? I could have the team do it. So why do I need a scrum master? So when people look at a scrum master as just an executive assistant that, okay, you just set meetings when we need it. You just make sure that the team has some stuff we tell you to go, okay, I need this. I need a bottle of water. So go to the store and get, get us some water. We can't get that database. Yeah, you go talk to that database guy. So that's pretty much what a lot of people has dumbed down Scrum masters. So when someone who's thinking money comes and look at it, oh yeah, we just got an executive assistant. Why do we need that? Why don't we just have to product manage product owner or some guy on the team do it. So just eliminate that role. Yeah. I've actually had management ask me why we need a scrum master. What do they do outside of the 15 minutes per day? Well, here we go. Like, let's, let's, good question. Let's get into this one because this is, this is the, the, you just hit the title of the podcast. You just used the title of the movie in the movie. Like, why do we need a scrum master? What do they do outside of the 15 minutes? Like we had a whole podcast. In fact, our last podcast, this was the whole. Point of the podcast, but if, if I'm leadership and I'm gonna challenge, like why, why can't the team do that? Like what, what what's your, what's your, like here, here I am on the, on the side of the table. I said I didn't want to be on here. I am, I'm management. Om, I don't understand why, why we have all these scrum masters organizationally speaking. Like you're, you're, you're my enterprise coach. Like all these scrum masters, maybe we've organizationally aligned them all to you for some reason. Cuz that's the way, because that's the way budgeting works. That's right. And you gotta meet me where I am and only try to influence it yet. Right. Okay. you've kind of gone along with it hoping that I would just wake up one day and I would fall in love with you and then there'll be live happily ever after or whatever. And then that day never came. So it's funny though because that, that actually happens in real life way too, way too often so I usually use a metaphor with them, right? So you've got a bunch of people if you have a bunch of teams, if you have one team, you have one, one team basically the team is rowing a boat, right? So you've got all these team members and they're busy developing, rowing a boat. Everybody is rowing in different directions. They're, they're rowing. Rowing is what they do. Scrum master is there to make sure that they can sound a drum beat that makes sure everyone's rowing in cadence with one another. So you move somewhere, otherwise you're gonna move, but not back. What we going forward, you're just gonna keep going around in circles or, you know, right. And so is there value in somebody standing at the, the back of the boat encouraging people to do things in a synchronized manner? If there is then you need a Scrum Master, And if you have multiple teams and you have all these people rowing these boats everywhere, they're gonna get in each other's way. It's not gonna move toward a destination anytime soon. so when I use that kind of an analogy, it, you know, it tends to be a little more effective, right? They, they kind of understand that. The other thing I tell 'em is, okay, so let's just run one of the teams for a sprint or half a sprint without a scrum master and see how it goes., if they're ED enough, they'd be interested in finding out, you know, exactly how that's going. And they'll soon find out that it's, it doesn't go so well Again I'm still on the executive side of the table over here and like you still haven't given me a compelling reason. Cause I, I speak numbers and I went to a fancy MBA school and I went to Stanford or whatever, so I'm smart. Harvard, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Oxford. Yeah. Yeah. I may have crashed a bank or two, but but I Oh, oh, you actually, here, here's, here's the here's the actual thing I've heard before from, from actual people with budgets of why would I spend X amount of dollars on a scrum master and when I could spend those same dollars and get another developer on my team and go faster? Maybe I came up to my executive path through development teams. So that is why I think that way. So you're not gonna change the way I think. What is the counter to this now? I, I'm just gonna simply illustrate adding one more rower to the boat isn't really gonna help you. You could do that. Instead of the scrum master. Now the boat's going around faster, but still in circles. It is, it, I think, I think one more rower would help us crash faster into the rocks . That is true. That is true. If that's what you're doing, I will say so, yeah. So that, that's the unfortunate thing that people don't, people don't see the value of something until it's no longer there. So the developers know exactly what to do, right? They know how to code, they know how to do they, listen, like I much like the executive assistant, like they're, they're sitting when we all used to work in offices, like I'm sitting in my chair for eight hours a day. That doesn't guarantee a single. Okay. That is true of executives also. Okay. Right. That is, I would say that's double, triple, quadruple true. For some, those chances are expensive for some executives. So let's just get rid of the whole company then. No, no. That chairs are expensive. Everybody go home, the corner office. Okay. Like I, again, I'm, I'm Mr. Executive in the Boy, I'm, I'm the, I'm the bad guy. This podcast, I kind of like it. Um, it's like I'm Mr. Executive of Brian and Om's software development company. Look, my name is on the marquee. That means I know what I'm talking about. Wall. That means I know what I'm talking about. Okay. That's how it works. Did you know that? That's how I know I'm, because my name is Peter. Peter Norton did that. I wrote my name on a wall and I know what I'm talking about. Yeah. Okay. Anyway that's, yeah. I'm dipping into Influence by Robert Chaldini right quick and be like, if I say my name over and over again, I, and I associate it with that. I know what I'm doing. It will stick. It sticks. Yeah. Yeah. You like that I think it's a great topic and I'm wanna say on it. I like you, you, you did highlight a concept that I wanted to get to which is you're telling me I need to, you're telling me I need to hire a scrum master. I'm telling you I think more developers would be better cuz then we can move faster. So we, we've countered with, you know, move faster to where, you know, you effectiveness. Yeah. Move faster to where? I go back to our podcast on Taylorism. Yes. Oh boy. All the way back. I'm reaching now. Also where's Alfonso at? Where's he been at? He dropped off the Earth. I seen he did, I dunno, come back. Alfonso, I heard from him a week or two ago where he, I got one of his apps. Oh yeah. The meeting expense app. Oh man. Fantastic. I use it all the time. Oh, you're really in. Yeah. We miss you Alfonz. You gotta come back. Yeah, please do. When Alfonz was here and we talked about Taylorism, we talked about there's a piece of our Taylorism podcast talking about brick laying. And what, what they found was like the, the, the person who's laying the bricks could be a lot more productive if you just added an assistant. They carry the wheelbarrow around, they hand the bricks up the ladder or whatever. They make sure the mortar is, refreshed when it runs lower, whatever, they don't need anywhere near the amount of skill that the brick layer needs. And anyway, it was an example in the, in, in in the book Principles of Scientific Management. I think they either doubled or tripled the brick layer productivity where they could build, you know, more wall, higher walls, more distance, faster in the same period of time when you added an assistant to help, deal with these tasks that didn't require a certain level of expertise. And it wasn't until Taylor got in that, like the brick layer was doing everything themselves. Come down a ladder, grab a brick, go back up the ladder. And it was kind of like when you think, when you talk about it afterwards, it's like, well, that's kind of. It's the classic elimination of waste that we talk about in the lean framework, right? Mm-hmm., that, that's what that was. But we didn't know it is that at the time when that was proposed years and years ago in a principles of scientific management book. But yeah, I mean, it makes sense to me. If you're eliminating waste, then you're gonna get better throughput. okay, so I'm back to being the combative executive. I went to Stanford, remember you. Well, I'm very smart. I went to Stanford. Look, I have my tie. You get your tie. There you go. I, I hear what you're saying, like that you're using this brick layer example to, to make an analogy of, oh, well you, you know, you do this for the development teams. You add somebody., I'm trying to meet you where you are. I'm trying to come around, but I can't hire this scrum master physician cuz first of all, scrum Master sounds ridiculous. I'm not gonna title them Scrum master, I'll title them something else. Brian Agility, , you see where I'm going with this? and second I don't know a way to measure somebody who sits on development team but doesn't actually actively do development work. So how am I gonna measure this person, first of all, you have to convince me management that bringing this person on will increase the effectiveness of my team. And in order to convince me of that, you have to show me before and after metrics. So let's say we agree to bring a scrum master on six month contract to hire some, you know, some, some plan like that. Dipping my toes in the water, I'm taking a chance. what are you laying down for me? The executive where I, you can prove that like, . Yes. We brought this person on. It was a good deal. They're making an impact here is how I show you. Yeah, that's, that's a great question cuz that's something that I think vexes a whole bunch of people out there, they're asked that show me that it works before I spend the money I think if you're gonna do that, you really do need to gather some metrics before, which is, you know, let, let's look at how much wait time there is in the, in the team Okay. For, dependencies issues, impediments risks, et cetera. What are they doing? so just ask the teams, write down those things when they occur, when they get resolved by the team themselves. Mm-hmm. or magically, and, and quantify those. Yeah. Right. And so numbers make a big difference. Write those down. Yeah. And then hire a Scrum master, but treat that as an experiment, if you will. Two to three sprints. Maybe. Would you quantify them just as, as best as you could? Cause I, I wrote, I'm taking some notes here. Yeah. Cause again, I'm an executive, so I'm gonna, I'm writing all these down. You got, they're going in your Should we putting on your iPad? Yeah. They're gonna, they're gonna, they're gonna be on your pip uh, . On, on your pip. My pdp . We're gonna take note of all the, the wait time and the dependencies and how many of them there are, and generally how long they take. We're, we're gonna track risks and stuff like that, and what we do with them, and whether they blow back up in our face. We're gonna look to quantify all these things together somehow. I, the executive would prefer that these things get quantified in terms of actual real money., but I guess proxy metrics are okay too if we can't tie them into money. Proxy metrics can almost always be tied to money. Almost always. The only ones that can't be are those improvements that the team does, like psychological safety and getting, you know, that trust built it. It's hard to quantify that, but for the most part, you can say if there's a delay of X number of hours for something get resolved, you can. Right. Uh, you absolutely can. So do that and then treat this as an experiment with management. Hopefully leadership will understand, but management, treat it as an experiment. Run with a scrum master for a few sprints, tracking the same, exact same type of metrics again, and then do a side by side before and after. Mm-hmm. perfectly on the same graph. So let, let's, let's take an example of the impediment, impediment re resolution, right? Yeah. So, developer has work to do. He has, to go build this form. Mm-hmm., right? And then he's finding out, okay, in about two or three days, I'm gonna need some data from the, from the database team. Now, would you want him to stop the work and go chase the database team to get that data, or let him keep coding while he's coding to build that form? And let the scrum has to go chase down the database team, get the access, get whatever he needs, get that data so that when that time gets there for him to implement that data, he's doing that. So kind of like a division of labor type type stuff. well, first of all, I don't, I, I always worry when he has that soft voice . I don't, I'm trying to play the angry executive, but I'm also like, I, I live in the world of product management. Like I, I am not going to pick up anything with my team. That delay is built into the system. I am gonna, I'm gonna destroy any system that has delayed built into it. An organization that is questioning the value of a Scrum master is unlikely to have effective POs. I'm just saying that. Yeah. Well, they may have effective POs with ineffective teams, so they may have frustrated. I've, I've seen organizations where the POs, the POs do know the POs are talking to customers. They are in front of customers. They do know the why, and they do know the what but their teams are incapable of slicing work into vertical slices, delivering anything that takes less than three months or whatever to get it product. I, I've seen that, you know, it's prevalent, right? This is another reason why you need scrum master. We can come in and say, listen, we need to slice the work appropriately. We need to make sure we don't over commit things like that. The teams aren't gonna do that. You ask a developer and stroke their ego and say, you can do this. Surely you could have this knocked down in, in a few hours, and then they struggle on it for a few days. But that's how, you know those people subvert you know, the team, right? They'll just go in and say, you can do this. Surely Right. You can do this. Yeah. Let me ask you another question and, Ayo maybe this is your question too. I, if you were to come into an organization and you're new to the organization as a scrum master mm-hmm., and, and you come in like they, they hire you in, congratulations Ayo by the way, you're hired. No, thank you. We can't pay you in money, but we can pay you in that drink . Um, like which you bring, which you br Yeah. You have to bring drinks.. I'm a manager. Do you get it now anyway? Yeah. Yeah. Anyway sorry. Also, we're gonna need you to work on the weekend. Yeah. Um, and uh you come in and say, well, look, we. We've gone on a limb and we, we've decided we wanna hire you to be our first scrum master in the organization. We haven't had scrum master before. We're taken a chance six months. And with the option, if we think that the position is valuable, we'll hire you on permanent after that and it'll be a permanent position. And that we, everything's I'm assuming we're not playing any games in this. Yeah, no politics. Yeah. Yeah. No politics, no games in this, but anyway, like we're gonna avoid all that. He comes in at eight and leaves at six. What the hell's wrong with it? That's right. What is wrong with that guy?? Oh boy. Do you remember those days? Oh yeah. Oh boy. You have metrics that I'm measuring against. I'm like, okay Ayo welcome to the organization. It's your first day. We've been tracking our cycle time, lead time. Let's start with there. We're tracking our cycle time, lead time, and, and, and through the tracking of our cycle time, lead time, we have the cost, we have the wait times so we can put a cost of delay to the wait times because we, we, we know the time from when our team picks it up and does the first set of requirements. Mm-hmm., I'm gonna say requirements cuz that's where, where that kind of organization now Yeah, yeah. Before the dev team actually picks it up and starts working on it. And then maybe the dev team in our organization hands off to some other team to deploy stuff to. So there's a, there's a cost of delay at the beginning and there's a cost of delay at the end. Like we're tracking all that. Okay. We know that cost of delay is bad and we're also tracking dependencies and we're tracking the work items. How many of them and how long the delay is. When something is dependent on another team has it go off and get worked and then come back to us and then we can do it. And we're tracking risks and things that could be, we're tracking, maybe we're tracking technical that may maybe actually, with our metrics, we're actually quite advanced with our metrics. We just don't know what to do because we're so busy a developers are so busy during the day. Welcome to my interview as a scrum master. Mm-hmm., you have six months basically to prove that you can knock these numbers down as a scrum master. Okay. Let's also assume you've got, you're working for, in this organization, you're working directly for the ceo, so climbing the ladder of management and getting the right people's ear is not an issue. Hmm. I understand. We're taking a huge assumption here. Yeah, I was gonna say you're blessed, but let's, let's pretend that's the, that's the role you have. You have carte blanche. That's right. I said carte blanche, . There may be more french words in this podcast. you, you can sac. you can basically recommend anything like you, you work directly for the ceo. So what, what's your, I was gonna say 30, 30, 60, 90 plan, but I, it could be longer than that. Yeah, it could be, you know what, what, what's your tiered step plan here to, to let you know that you are the person I want to hire. Part of the, the grief that surrounds this topic online is people wanna hire a life coach. and a life coach is not really gonna make impactful organizational change. They're just gonna make me feel good about, like, oh, we're meeting you where you are and the way you are right now, Ayo is great. You don't need to change anything. That's not true. Thank you for gracing my couch for an hour. I'll see you next month. I'm hiring, I'm taking a chance. This is a way this person who thinks about it, master I'm taking a chance on, I could be hiring another developer and I think that that's the right thing to do, but I'm taking a chance on this person that supposedly could accelerate my business. You see the disdain that I said in the, yeah. Okay. Of course. What, how are you gonna prove this? How, how are you gonna prove this? Like, I, I'm tracking these problems, so I, I'm committed, what are you going to do mm-hmm. in the organization to try to improve all, all of the metrics I'm tracking, which is the wait time, the dependencies, the risks, the cost of delay. Let let, let's just kind of go one or two steps at a time on this one, maybe, right? So what's the first thing you would do to a short term, long term like that, right? What's the first thing you would do? Because you, you've, you've been told what metrics they're already measuring. So they have the metrics and they have the metrics and they're looking for you to improve. Maybe I'm not measuring any of this stuff., maybe. Yeah. The reality that I've been in is they don't even know what cycle time time means. They read it somewhere maybe, right? Maybe, oh, maybe they saw a TikTok video. I don't know. But first thing I would do is to say, okay, you're measuring all these things. Let me look at the things you're measuring as variables. Make sure they're the right things you're measuring. Whether I agree or not agree, I will still baseline all of that stuff. Mm-hmm., right? That's the first thing I would do, is put a date against what you're measuring and the values and baseline it, and, and then go about my business as a scrum master and come back to it periodically. Initially, maybe every sprint or two sprints, come back and look at that and add to that, add to that graph. Like, here's your baseline. How are you doing? How are you tracking against that, right? Mm-hmm.. So the baseline is a, a, I was gonna say a line in the sand. A, a line on a graph. Um, if you are improving, trend the team, right? It's a trend. It's a trend. Yeah. So if you're improving the team, you, you wanna see where your data points are against that, right? Yeah. Yeah. And you map that over a few sprints. Mm-hmm., and I guarantee you, if you're scrum master worth salt, you are going to see a deviation from that trend line towards the better you, you're gonna see that cuz you're doing your job and, and so periodically you would get in front of that manager Yeah. And say, here is how we are tracking today. And then you're gonna say extrapolate this six months out. Boom. There you go., we talked about this actually last night Oh yeah. There's a element of self-promotion here that a lot of people are uncomfortable with... before you'd put times and dates to things that had dependencies. Now there's almost no dependencies in any of the backlog items cuz we vet them out after the refinements and make sure that things that have dependencies either either get moved off until the dependencies are knocked out and, you know, kicked down in the backlog or we break them up and hand 'em to the teams that are responsible or whatever. Or maybe the better thing is we've done a little responsive organizational design here and there. Little, little sprinkling around here in this first six months. You'd be weird really doing well to do that. I, I, I mean, it depends. It depends it depends how much they're hurting. I've gone into an organization, I've, I've gone into this product, but product wearing my, like, Hey, I've been in an agile coach role before hat. basically the, the person with experience in the room hat. Yeah. And I've recommended organizational changes to say like, Hey, if we change these things, I think we'll be more efficient. Your positioned at a different level at that point than a scrum master typically would be, especially if they were the first Scrum master this company's looking at. So there's no credibility, right. You build your own credibility to your point about self-promotion. Yeah. That is very much true that people, people are afraid to do that and I don't know why they are. Yeah. So at that point in time, you've been more of an agile coach then, right? I'm glad you brought it up and I'm gonna pivot right now because so there is the like this is a real thing with the people, like the people near the top of the field, the people that have been practicing the longest, they will tell you that title creep. in the field is a real thing. Like it used to be everyone was Scrum masters. Mm-hmm.. And then the, some scrum masters re retitled themselves as agile coaches because they felt that the, the, the, the, the pool of people that were Scrum masters were like getting diluted with a people with two day certs, didn't really know what they were doing. Or people that didn't have development backgrounds that didn't really know how to train other people in XP and whatever. And then they, they called themselves agile coaches. And now, now you have another level of the enterprise coaches and I see product coaches, now it's starting to become a hot thing. Mm-hmm., the growth product managers are be starting to become a hot thing, they're breaking up the fellowship now and going different ways at the end of the movie because they're all trying to. Bring their own rings into the picture. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Here's another thing. You, we can go back to that 2 99. You could hire, you could have the, the, the Scrum masters as the assistant brick layer and the scrum coaches as the actual brick layer , how about that? You, you could, but that's why we, we needed to get through the , what are you gonna do for the organization? I'm, well, I'm trying to get you through the, the, what are you gonna do for my organization? Uh, discussion, not, oh, number one, because I'm quite enjoying playing the angry manager. Uh, but also, oh, the, actually the obstinate manager is what I'm playing right now. OB Obstinate. Yeah. Cause I don't wanna change my ways. I just wanna layer this new, new fan angle, agile stuff over my current way of working and say, see, we were doing it the right way the whole time. Now give me my yearly bonus. Right. You, you just brought a new set of terminology on what we were already doing all along Anyway, , right. We have project managers. What no project managers in, we'll just call 'em project managers that's, or agile delivery leads. Mm-hmm. You're gonna get that. You're absolutely gonna get that going into an organization. You need to look sideways too, not just the team that you're coaching or, or, or Scrum Master. Mm. Well look at how other teams are working, that's gonna give you a sense of what the level of agility is at that company. And once you establish that, you can basically play your next card. Right? Okay. Okay. So, so step one is come up with some baselines. Come up with the, the current level of, yeah. So have, have a baseline of where, where the company is and where the team is, and then see how you can, you can grow that, how you can make that better. And then you can display that. So create some kind of like, like a, like a dashboard. Okay. I'm, I mean, I, I'm a hundred percent on board for more transparency through throughout all layers. I'm also a hundred percent on board for anything that is one, a single source of truth. Mm-hmm. that I can drive the whole business to. If I can have a single source of truth for where things are and I don't have to drive around, oh, okay. I'll go to this project manager, he tells me something and I go to this other project manager, but I really don't go to them very often cuz every, they always spin it where it's not their fault and they always tell me everything's good. So I don't really go to them anymore. And then I go to this other project manager cuz they tell me the, the in the weeds kind of stuff, and then I know who else to talk to., rather than play that game, I would rather go to one single source of truth and see the information from myself. So I, I'm, that's good for me, that's good for me. As, as the obstinate executive in this example. But now, okay, now I'm seeing the, the, the problem with presenting clear data to people, especially people in management role is once they see it presented in a, in a transparent and clear way, once you go through the, the time of getting every team to track their metrics and getting every team to fill out their stuff every day and to move work items and stuff like that, once you get all that stuff down and you get it and you roll it into a dashboard for an executive, the executive, the first thing I'm gonna say is, okay, this is this is great. Okay, so what do we do with this? So what, actually, no, I'm sorry. They'll say, so what are you going to do next with this? Of course, the wait time is this, and of course we need less risks, and of course we need to manage the dependencies of. A hundred percent on board. Great response. What's next? What? Like, that's the first 30 days. What, what's the, the mi like the 30 to 90 day range. Now, how are you gonna drive change for the organization? What does that look like? How are you gonna start? Because in the first 30 days that I've had a scrum master working in my organization, I've taken it upon myself, the very busy manager. I'm very busy to read the scrum guide. And I found this little snippet inside the scrum guide. And it says, and I quote, , the scrum master is accountable for the team's effectiveness. that's what I read online in your Holy Scrum document. Like it says, you are accountable for the team's effectiveness. So, so that means I need some kind of metric for the, for the team's effectiveness that I can hold you to. Oh boy. Again, well, I sound really combative. I'm really getting, this is fine. I'm into this role. Let, let's get in this. So what, what are you going, what are you gonna, yeah. How are you gonna show that? So you talk about, so then we show you de delivery, right? Every sprint we deliver, we plan, we gonna deliver this much. And we show you how the trends has been going on. We've delivered this form, we've delivered that form, we've delivered that form. We show you how much we're progressing through the delivery of the entire product. Mm-hmm.. So we say, okay, we're gonna deliver some refund stuff. We've. In the past month or so, we've delivered you the, the scan bar. Sure. That works. Now we are gonna deliver to you the actual hardware. Okay. That actually scans that scan bar. Now we're gonna show you the, so that, that delivery over time showing you how we are progressing towards the final goal of the product. And we could create a dashboard if you want to, that shows you how much we've done over the past few sprints or weeks or whatever you want to call it. Would you start with the volume of delivery? I'm going down this road. I've also been in organizations where like take it from me, everyone listening, all bo, both of you listening,. you can fix the delivery problems and say we are delivering twice the work in half the time. And then the business is still infuriated because they could care less about anything you're delivering. So if the metrics I'm judging you off of are all metrics about working in the business. Ed, you're gonna, you're gonna like this one. Uh, got, got this one for you. He, he just looked up at the monitor. Yeah. Gino Wickman Traction book. It's the book where they introduced the entrepreneurial operating system. The EOs e os. Yeah. And, and uh, in that book, he outlines the concept of everybody at the company has to work in the business. You're an employee, you're punching out work, you're sending it to customers, you're making money for the company that's working in the business. Okay. But then he outlines a concept of occasionally you have to stop, take a big step back and look at the business from outside and work on the business. This is what I'm driving to is. You spend a significant amount of time fixing the delivery function. Mm-hmm. delivery function is very important. Without the delivery function, if you're going six, eight months without delivering anything, truly everyone will be outta the job. I've seen that happen too. Sure. Yep. No, no delivery. And the management just gets frustrated and says, I'm just canning this whole team, you're out. You're all gone. Oh, yeah, I'll, I'll start over and I'll take a chance. I've seen that, so I hope I obviously been on projects like that. Yeah. Don't let that happen. But the metrics associated with working on the business, the attempts and things that we've tried, things that we've failed, succeeded. What? and you showing progress that goes way deeper than fixing the delivery function. Yeah. And I would argue, I would argue that most Scrum Masters number one, self-promotion, that's why I brought up self-promotion real or well real early. That's why I brought up self-promotion. I think it's important managers, if you read the Amazon book the Working Backwards Amazon book about how they appoint single threaded leaders to say, okay, you're Ayo, you're the person in charge of all of this segment of the business, Amazon Alexa, whenever anyone in the business wants to know about the future of Amazon Alexa, we all go to you. Okay? You have the budget, you have all the teams, everything. We all go to you completely your responsibility, single threaded leader in the organization. So if you are the single threaded leader in the organization that we go to for the effectiveness of whatever teams, right? Whatever team or teams you're assigned to, hopefully it's not a lot of teams, cuz that gets ridiculous. Sure. What are your metrics now for working on the business? I feel the problem, what we're having now and the, the, the, the obstinate manager that I'm playing on TV right now they don't talk about, nor do they have awareness about working on the business, continually improving. He's asked you some questions. I'll let you respond first, but I have something I wanna jump in with. Let me, lemme let you go because it looks like, okay, so let me look. Spin in there. One are, one of the things about these types of metrics, they're typically bundled up under feely, right? Oh, the teams is, the teams are happier. Now, how do you know how much happier?, 30% happier. You can't really peg down a percentage on it. So I think it goes back to what we were talking about. We said, how do you improve The team's effectiveness. Most of the time, management, management are, are focused on the team's efficiency, not effectiveness. So when you talk about metrics that speak of improvements or otherwise of effectiveness, they're kind of gone like, oh, the teams are happier now. How much happier are they? How do you know they're happier, first of all? Mm-hmm.. Right? How do you measure happiness? Are you tracking it? Exactly. You have to do that. You have, and there are ways to do this, first of all, so., our audience are thousand, 48 people out there. Oh you complain. Oh, you can't measure this stuff Om! I say, no, you absolutely can. Yeah, yeah, right. There are ways to do this. Again, baseline is important. Day one, baseline, everything., are your team members hanging around longer as teams? Is their team churn? Is it slowed down? Is it sped up? Look at those things because that's a direct result of the team members, being content with working on a team. They hang around. Mm-hmm. happy teams are productive teams, right? Oh, yeah. Productivity. The obstinate manager in me might have a an evolution in my thinking. If you were to capture that, oh, oh, this is just a, this is a fluffy metric and I, there's no value in this metric for me. It's just, well, what do I care about people's feelings? What a statement. What a statement to get outta somebody. Right? Like, what do I care about? Feel . What good is empathy? What good is human? Yeah. the first thing you went to, which is, which is, is not a knock on you. I expect 99.9% of ScrumMasters to tell me the exact same answer. I'm gonna stabilize delivery first because without delivery, yes. We can't do anything else. Yes, I, I would've, that's not a bad answer. If you show me that delivery cadence, what your team is working on down to the story level, I mean real low level details, and then you overlap that, that happiness metric over every day at the end of standup, hit the button. Are you, you know, smiley face straight whatever. I call it the man face neutral. Face neutral man or, or mad face. I dunno if I'm happy. Or that mad face upside down. Or maybe, maybe there's four. Maybe there's an actual mad face. Yeah. Yeah. just sh show me that overlapping, because I guarantee you that on, on certain days where it's like the majority of sad faces or whatever it's gonna be when we're in the mid sprint, when we're having problems or issues cropped up or, or just in the deployment. Yeah. But I guarantee you those, those days where we knock out the sprint goal or people swarm and knock out a story or a story ends, yeah. Those are gonna be the happy days. I, I would be looking for trends like that and then I'd be looking back to my delivery I'd, I'd actually be looking back to delivery to try to use delivery to increase the happiness in my teams. And now we're at, now, now, like we just went through Huge. Went to Warp Drive. Yes, we did. And we are in a whole different universe right now. We didn't even know that we could get here. We thought it was gonna take thousands of years the happy, sad me mad that, that you talked about the Japanese. We've been doing it for years. They call it the Nico Nico. Mm. Calendar. So basically, it's really simple, right? You have a sprain, two, three weeks, whatever it is. Just drop a calendar and ask your team you know, on the way out of the, the Daily Scrum perhaps just reflect on yesterday and put one of the images on there. Like, how did the yesterday go? Did you feel happy, sad, mad, glad. Right. Just put that on there and at the end of the sprint you can look back and as Brian was saying, you could see trends. There were certain times when everybody's happy because things were really just falling into place. Other times when majority of the people were not happy because, and then you can dive into the, because why, how do we prevent that from happening again? So again, management may or may not understand that leadership certainly will understand. That is my hope out there. Yeah. Right. Because happy teams are more productive that there's been a whole bunch of research done on that. Yeah. There's actually a tool that my last company that we had where we do, it's not really a retrospective, it's like, a, a quarterly event where we, the teams get together and we I'm trying to remember what, what, what the, what the tool was called. Where we, we go through and we have different items to, to talk about. Okay, what do you, it is, I guess it goes in the line of a retro, but it's not really a retro wear on a quarterly basis saying, okay, what do you think happened? How did this happen? did we think we're, we're doing good? Kind of just, just try trying to measure that, that happiness of how people see the team is and. That, that actually fosters discussion within the team of, okay, you obviously have some people that, that don't want to talk, but you have Sure. But you have, they kind of, everybody has to participate is a team participation that everybody has to move some item to where they think this, is it going good? Is it going bad? And then we could talk about that. And then when you're done, it creates some kind of a diagram that you can actually, anonymously share with management and say, okay, this is what the team said. Mm-hmm. on this different items. Okay. are, are we getting management buy-in? Are we, are we, are we getting, we delivering, are we doing all this kind of different stuff, different items on that list? and you can share that with management and showing that, okay, the team is doing well, the, the goal is being met. there might be some items there where we we don't even know why we're even working for this company in the first place. I think those kinds of reflective experiences are useful, but because they are longer in terms of ti the time horizon, monthly, quarterly, that's where I think you could use in the day kind of things like this, Nico Nico matrix? Because people forget Three months out and you go, wow. How do we feel? they focus on the last emotion they had. Yeah. Right, right. Which is maybe last week, you know, you got three whole months out there. Right., so yeah, you could, you could try and use both that way, maybe. Mm-hmm. There is a way you can you could do this in Excel or anything like that. Right. You could superimpose sprints, just anonymize the dates. It says day one, day two, day three, right. Yeah. Yeah. And just look out for four sprints, five sprints out, and superimpose those images and see, when I did this one time, what I found is those team members that were always, ugh, things aren't going so well. Over four sprints. You could see a slight change I'm like, oh, there's maybe a glimmer of hope here. You know? So I took it as a positive. But you wouldn't know that until you actually track it. Mm-hmm.. So that's really, I guess the bottom line on that is track it. Track it with people such as the obstinate manager. You could say, look, if we're doing this well, and it's only been four sprints, if I extend that out. He told me I have six months. Right. I'll just go three months. Here's how, here's where we are, here's where we will be. Cuz when you extrapolate, it does a magnifying impact. Right. So show that to I think, I guess I'm going back to our self promotion thing. Use that your advantage and go, maybe I don't get that exact, but I'm gonna be close. So we're gonna be so much. In this example where I pitched, I was like, you're working for the ceo. That's highly irregular. Very. So if you join the company as an executive, like that is likely the advice you're going to get is you need to do more self-promotion. Self-promotion, because you, you. A member of leadership and as a member of leadership, you need to walk around. I just, I, I was just texting with Ed this morning about this. As a member of leadership, you need to repeat the vision for your whole team to hear, you need to repeat why we are here doing what we're doing. You need to repeat the mission and, and maybe the vision. Yeah. Um, both actually. You need to keep repeating them. And, and if I, the, the top executive, if I have not projected the vision and, and, and my leaders don't know what it is, so they don't know what to repeat, you failed. You need to let me know. Any leader that catches it needs to bubble it back up to say, Hey, I don't hear anyone talking the mission and the vision. let's discuss that. Cause I, I, like, I feel if, if we're gonna go with some more advanced stuff, we didn't even get into helping product. Right. I feel the, the effective of Scrum master in this organization kind of knows what the product hierarchy should look like. Yeah. The CSM and the Cspo class together, they're like 75% overlap is a lot of overlap. And that's for a reason. Yeah. Obviously it's a lot of overlap. So, so if, if only one of us is, is. Quote, trained, certified, whatever you wanna call it. Ordained. Yeah, even in the old executive assistant model of the scrum master? Let's say that you don't even want to climb, you don't even want to be running up this hill like Kate Bush. You heard on TikTok, you can make 150 gs and then you saw. You saw all these people that work at Google that, you know, they, they take the bus for two hours. They eat lunch for five hours, and they only work for like 30 minutes during the day. I feel like I'm making a statement. I'm not trying to make a statement. The point is like there, that there are people who are like I don't, I actually, Brian, I hear your whole podcast, but I disagree. I don't need to do any of this. I'm getting paid a lot. I don't have to do any of this. It sounds like a lot of work for how long? for how long though. That's, that's the thing. Because, because that, that's, that's, that's the one thing, that's the one thing I keep going back to a lot of these people. who get that, yes, there's, there's always that chance that they will get that job. But I guarantee you, three months down the line, the company was smart up and no, this guy he doesn't know Jack. He just got coached through the interview and he got the job. But now, three months down the line, there's no productivity. Yeah. There's no delivery, there's no efficiency, there's nothing. Fake it. Fake it to you. Don't make it till you get fired. The other element that we haven't talked about in here, which like, I guess it's kind of good that we haven't talked about it cuz it's gonna burn all like a, a million hours. Talk about it is like with your agile... implementation. That's right. I'm calling it that. I call it implantation, but implant. Oh, no, . That sounds so when, when the person who's sponsoring Agile at your company leaves No. And you know that that's when all the Scrum masters get fired When the single person who, who is sponsoring agile at your company leaves like that's when everything erodes and, and goes away. But I, but I feel only, only in the case where, again, the, where I was talking about you, you could be an executive, a, a high powered executive assistant who is skilled in self-promotion, and you will make it through that round of firings because people will say to themselves like, well, we can't possibly get rid of this person. They're, they do all these things because my perception is they do all these things well. Well, I, if you don't have metrics in place, , that's not like ingrained in your organizational culture. Data driven decision making or you're not measuring the scrum master on any of the work they do on the business. You only track work done in the business. You track lines of code or some other ridiculous metric like that, you know, or, or amount of features delivered per whatever week or month or whatever it is. And this person can't contribute to that. So then I go, it comes back to the conversation we started with is like, well, why wouldn't I just spend my money on a developer to row me into the rocks faster? That's what I need. I need to get to where I'm going faster. Yeah. And, and you know, and you'll get the result you're looking for, right? Yep. You get what you paid for, you crash, you crash into the rocks. Yeah. You get what you paid for because the product wouldn't there. There's no efficiency, there's no effectiveness, there's just. Rowing. Just speed. Yeah. For the sake of speed, we're just speeding in a circle. You know the other thing I had written down that we didn't, I didn't bring up cuz we like, we were just kind, I'm trying, I'm just trying to cook these it up topics. Is who is, who is accountable? For continuous improvement. I thought you said a scrum. Oh, the organization. Oh, the organization. No, in the, in the example where I'm, I'm the obstinate manager saying, I just wanna hire another developer. Just gimme another developer. More developers. That's the answer. More developer, whatever. The que like, oh, I can't sell things fast enough, more developers. That's my answer. Oh, I don't know how to, like, I'm, I'm getting audited cuz I, I can't hire accountants. More developers. More, more you. You mean more sales guys?, my building's falling apart, my plumbing doesn't work. More developers, building it faster. The concept I just brought up. I want to make sure that I am putting some effort into working on the business and that my business, the package of my business is improving the, the process. Policies, the stuff with the people, right? What we talked about. Yeah. Nico is with Nico. Nico. Nico. I like it. Nico. Nico. We are improving. How, like that You're not gonna get that out of any of the working in the business metrics. That's right. You only get that when you take a step back. So if we don't have Scrum masters, if we have scrum masters, it's straightforward. Okay, cool. The Scrum masters for their team, or they're segmenting the organization or whatever they're responsible for that they can bring it to us. They can roll it up all the way up to the leadership team. They can do leadership team retrospectives, for example. There's a lot of ways we can utilize Scrum Masters in the organization. They don't have to just serve a team. Correct. Uh, but if I don't have them, if I don't have Scrum master in my organization or someone's playing the role, I haven't got to say that in a long time. No, that's right. I like it. Like who's, who's, who's accountable? I mean, o other than the, the cop out answer of, well, leadership obviously. Your manager's responsible for making, he, they're gonna tell you, you must, continuous improvement is mandatory and you must do it. And fun is mandatory. And you must say you will now have fun . Yeah. For the next 13 minutes. No. So scrum masters, right? So the latest scrum guide says the scrum master coaches the team, the Scrum master coaches product. Mm-hmm., the scrum master coaches, the organization. Organization. If they're not there, that's three levels of coaching you're missing. Mm-hmm. Think about that for a second, right? Yeah. Three levels of coaching that is just gone prominently absent, right. It's not there. So you're gonna feel that it's completely vacated. Right. So yeah, you're gonna definitely feel that. Why do we need it? We should bring it back to that question. It's like, why do we need to fill that vacant seat? Mm-hmm., why, why do we need to make sure we are continually improving as an organization? That's one of the questions that anybody interviewing at an organization should ask the interviewer, not just Scrum Masters, product owners, anybody. What are the top two challenges that this organization has today? And how have you been addressing them? Because presumably assuming the, the you is directed at somebody like a, an obste manager or whoever is interviewing you, right? Sure. Well, how have you tried to address those? And if they can't answer that, or if they sugarcoat it. Or if they am out their way through it. Leave, don't work for that company because they don't know. They don't know what they don't know. They're not hiring you for that. They're hiring you for a Scrum master role or a product owner, a role. If leadership has not done their job and they don't understand the challenges that they're faced with today. You are, you are basically Sisyphus, you know, trying to push that rock uphill and you're on your own and the hill is pretty steep and the rock is amazing. May, maybe that's why they need you. You're not Hercules, you're Sisyphus. Maybe that's why they need you. It's too big for you to, to show them what they show, what they don't know. Shove up hill. Right. I'm Kate Bush only running. Yeah. I, I like running up the hill. I'm only running up that hill now. That song's now playing in my head. I, I wanna go back to what we started with is, is why do we need a scrum master kind of thing. Right. The value with the value of a scrum master. After a few sprints of having been on the job, if you didn't benchmark to begin with, the current state of play, I like to call it. Current state of play. And then you continuously updated that every whatever, situational. Maybe every sprint, maybe every month. I'm more busy manager. Om You're not getting more than a touchpoint every month. That's, I'm fine. I'm fine. And I might miss a month. The metrics are Yeah. Or miss every two months. I'm, I'm fine with that. That that's on you. But I will, I will plot right on that chart. Right. Those things that we talked about earlier in the podcast. Mm-hmm.. So when we do meet, I can say, look at the deviation between the status quo you had mm-hmm. and where we're going, where we are. Sorry, not we're, and I'm gonna now extrapolate that Right. In a straight line, extrapolation and say if I continue to get the gains that I've gotten, Over the last few sprints. Okay. Months, whatever. Um, that's where we're going, right? That's the little bit of that is self-promotion. Right. But a lot of that is evidence based, right? So projections are what they are. Forward looking statements is what financial financial people call that, but that's all we've got. We don't know what's gonna happen in the future. What we do know is what's happened from day one that I, I joined this company to now, and if I continue, there's no reason to doubt that I can continue along this projection line. That's what I hope to deliver. So six months later we, we meet the obstinate manager and we say, , where's my offer? I've done all these things. Right. Because you've now got data behind it. Right. You've now got that line they had before. Yep. That line would not have. Had they not hired you. Mm-hmm., that is, that is your baseline. And then you've got that line that's higher, no matter how higher, that doesn't matter. What matters is the projection, right? So at six months you project out another six months. You wanna hire me today, Brian, as the manager. Here's where I've got to today in six months, but here's where I can get to in the next six months. Where can I sign? That's really the approach, I think.