When it comes to challenging roles in an enterprise, being a Scrum Master is one of them. Your job is to deal directly with people and try to interact and solve their problems. You are essentially a bridge between the people and the business while ensuring that your team has the expertise and motivation to meet customer expectations.
As a Scrum Master, while you get to enjoy the thrill of working with agile, sometimes you would face difficulties and are bound to make mistakes. But these mistakes can be rectified if you follow the following remedies and invest in yourself by earning a CSM® certification.
Let’s take a look at 4 common mistakes you can avoid, being a Scrum Master.
- Having No Emergency Plan
After each sprint, Scrum requires a retrospection. But sometimes it’s not enough. This leads to a situation which might require an urgent action plan to resolve.
Remedy
In a situation like this, you, as a Scrum Master should conduct a focused meeting and find solutions with team collaboration. You need to have an emergency retrospective of what has slowed down the process and identify actions that will avoid similar issues.
Set a simple structure for the meeting; learn what went wrong from the team member’s perspective and discuss what corrective measures can be taken to minimize the damage. It’s best to avoid the blame game and take action in a neutral way. A CSM course will help you figure out the best approach on how to structure the meeting.
- Poor Communication with the Operations Team
A lot of times, the developers and the operations’ teams have different types of tasks. They work separately to complete their goals. When there is a communication gap between both, it can lead to complexities.
Remedy
For making the collaboration easy, the Scrum Master can start by improving the communication between the two teams. Increase the frequency of discussions between the team leaders of both sides. This will lead to better communication, where both the teams would be on the same page. Also, you can team up a developer with an Ops team member to test the environment when the deployment changes.
- Regression
A broken release implies regressions. Regressions need to be caught early so that the team has enough time to fix them.
Remedy
An easy solution for this problem is to implement an automated acceptance test and run it every day on the test environment where the last changes were deployed. Usually, team members are reluctant to try this method. But as a Scrum Master, you can try this as an experiment.
How about if one team member( maybe even the Scrum Master) writes a few automated acceptance tests and presents them to the team? This approach has two advantages.
First, it validates that automated tests are the correct solution for a specific problem. Secondly, one person learns how to implement the automated acceptance tests and can teach others later. It becomes easier to accept the new change in methodology.
- Spilling work from one sprint to another
This is one of the worst habits a Scrum team adopts: jumping from one sprint to the next one. The reason for this; the team is unable to finish all the product backlog items on the task list and they simply carry the work over the next sprint.
This will happen from time-to-time if the deadlines of the sprint are not taken seriously. If spillover is a problem for you, here’s what you can do.
Remedy
First of all, you need to break the habit. Motivate the team to plan its next sprint in such a way that they are able to finish all the tasks at hand. This means, have a light workload and plan the next sprint cautiously. Then, if things go as per the plan, add more to the sprint.
Next, if the team is not able to meet the target, make them realize their mistakes and review what went wrong. It’s important for your team members to change their casual work style to a more efficient and productive one. This can be done if you encourage them to view their tasks as a new challenge to be accomplished.
Work With Your Team to Get The Most Out Of Your Scrum Environment
It is not easy to manage a scrum work environment. A skilled Scrum Master can have a positive impact by enhancing his/her communication skills with the team, updating work policies regularly and enforcing best practices inside the team.
