Community of Practice for Scrum Masters

The Scrum Master is one of the most important roles of Scrum. It takes years to master this role and interacting with others serving in the same role can advance one’s progress. While there are many ways to grow into the journey of Scrum Master, and here is a link to my previous blog post discussing this (https://agilonomics.com/an-ideal-career-path-for-a-scrum-master/), one of the things that can help a lot is working as a community, popularly known as the Community of Practice for Scrum Masters, or Scrum Master COP. In this article I will share with you my experience for the past 15 years, In which I facilitated the Scrum Master COP for many teams, departments and organizations. I will also share with you how I made these practices engaging and successful. 

The first step of the community of practice would be to start with an invitation that helps the scrum masters in your group or department understand the value of coming together and sharing success stories, challenges, learning from and growing together.

Logistical guide to hosting community of practice meetingsThe very first Community of Practice session should include a game to bring out topics of interest and prioritizing them. I have often played an Agile game called “Thirty Five”. This game needs all scrum masters present to write one topic of their interest on a piece of paper and put it in the middle of the table. All cards are mixed up and everyone gets to pick a random card (ideally a card other than the one they wrote). 

The scrum masters are then split into pairs, where they converse and discuss the cards that they picked. They have to agree to split the number 7 between the two topics, using only integers. The value given to each topic depends on how important they are in relation to each other. For example, the split could be 4 for one topic and 3 for the other, 7 and 0, 6 and 1, 5 and 2   and so on. After agreeing to the value distribution, the two members exchange the cards and repeat the process 4 more times with 4 other scrum masters. If a topic was very hot and important for all, it could get 7 from all conversations in each round. 7 x 5 rounds equals 35, and that’s how the game gets its name.

Next, bring all the cards together and prioritize them based on the voting by the community. This gives you an organic way of getting a prioritized list of topics with everybody’s buy in. In the very first community of practice, you may briefly want to summarize the result of this game, what each topic means, the number of votes each topic has, and some conversation about the process and how it can be improved. 

In the subsequent Community of Practice sessions, consider discussing topics from the prioritized list beginning with the most important one at the top (with the most votes), and have deep dives. I recommend the frequency of these COP meetings should be between 1 to 4 times a month (once in two weeks is an ideal when possible).

How do you do deep dives (diving deep into a topic)? Remember, this is a community of practice, not one person doing it all. You have to engage the participants, make sure that everybody contributes and learns from the deep dive sessions. You can ask for volunteers among scrum masters who want to come prepared for the topic that will be discussed in the next COP session, and they can start by sharing what they have prepared. This process should always have a format which starts with playing an ice breaker game or “checking in”, diving deep into the topic, having engaging conversations, and coming out with  takeaways. Takeaways become a powerful tool for reflection and transformation.

As a facilitator of the COP (this role is ideally rotated), you can take some notes and publish this as an internal document on a confluence page or google drive, and share it with everybody. The sharing part is important because even the people or scrum masters who were unable to attend the COP session can review and benefit from the notes. 

As an Agile Coach transcribing the notes and adding additional examples and personal experience helps add value to the document which is appreciated and utilized by the scrum masters. 

When you facilitate the Community of Practice for other teams or departments, it would be highly beneficial to empower a local scrum master to keep the group together, making sure people are receiving and responding to the invites and that they are helped to overcome the impediments to be able to attend the COP. Some examples of impediments could be an urgent meeting coming up, or having too many things on their plate, etc. 

Try to secure a budget for food. It is very easy to get more participation if food is offered during these meetings. For one company I would do this for each site between 12:00 to 1:30 PM, which would overlap with the lunch time, sponsored by the leaders which helped increase participation. 

Although this is the community of scrum masters, feel free to open it to other passionate Agilists who work with the Scrum Masters, such as Product Owners or other team members. They appreciate it and provide unique contributes. It is exciting to see passionate people engaging together. All of the participants may not have gotten the chance to play the Scrum Master role yet, but may get inspired to do that in the future after being exposed to this practice.

How to engage the participants in the Community of Practice? Do not bore the people with long lectures. Guide the lead who is owning the particular topic they would be driving in the next COP with some ideas of engagement. One of the most popular formats I have had success with is the use of 10-15 minute breakout session in which people have conversations in small groups (2-4 small groups) to digest what they have learned or to answer some questions before going into the next phase of discussion. A lot of positive feedback has been received with this format, because, as human beings, we love to connect with each other to resolve the common issues.

Another popular idea is to invite external speakers once in a while to your COP meetings. I’ve done this many times. At one company, I was organizing the COP at 4 different sites: San Francisco, San Mateo, San Diego and Los Angeles. Every once in a while, I would invite someone from the local city that was an Agile leader to come and share their knowledge on a particular topic, either dynamically selected or from the prioritized list.

Occasionally, I would take a whole group of my scrum masters to visit a different company to experience their Agile culture and environment. For example, I took my scrum masters from San Mateo and San Francisco PlayStation offices to the Spotify office in San Francisco. The coming together and sharing with learning was appreciated by all. 

Although you do have a prioritized list of items to be discussed, every once in a while you can take a break from that list and organize Lean Coffee - a popular technique to discuss several issues in a timeboxed manner. Lean Coffee is actually also a tool which unfortunately, now requires a fee. It is a technique popularized by the rules of the tool by the same name, where everybody puts their quick ideas or topics that they want to discuss or share, and the amount of time they want to discuss those ideas for. The people vote among those ideas, and get a local prioritized list of topics to discuss for that COP meeting. You go from the top of the list, timeboxing the discussions. If the timebox expires before the discussion is over, get a vote of thumbs to assess the need for further discussion or  the group can move on to the next topic, and so on.

This divergence from the initial prioritized topics provides the agility for the group to discuss issues that could be more meaningful at that particular time.

In conclusion, Community of Practice Meetings are a platform for powerful collaboration for Scrum Masters to share and receive knowledge, ideas for tackling challenges which helps to contribute to their team effectiveness and Agility. How do you run your Community of Practice for Scrum Masters? What challenges have you faced? What are your measures of success?

Amitabh (Amit) Sinha is a servant leader entrepreneur, visionary, mentor, trainer and coach. Amit is highly passionate about Agile, its principles, values, and the human side. Amit is a people champion and strives to bring out the best in his teams. Amit leverages his expertise in Agile, Scrum, Kanban and people skills to increase team effectiveness and happiness. See more

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

2 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
HOSTING SUPPORT

Thank you for calling GoDaddy hosting support!

Alex Todore

Thanks for your views on COP for SMs. Do you also have ideas on how to enable Product Owners for similar COP meetings? What about how to do this for remote teams?
Thank
Al

EXPERIENCE AGILE. START TODAY

2
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x

Enter E-mail Address

We promise to keep your email address safe. You can check our Privacy Policy.

Patrick Foster

Agile Coach


Patrick Foster

I’m a leader who serves as an Agile Coach in organizations.

I help senior leadership plan long-term strategic decisions while embracing the Agile mindset.

I also work with teams to help them become self organizing on their journey of providing value to the customers.

I see my clients as creative, resourceful, and whole and I’m here to walk alongside them to achieve business outcomes.

Elena Vassilieva

Innovation Leader Coach & Agile Transformation Adviser

Elena Vassilieva is an executive leadership coach who uses virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) to facilitate sustainable and immersive feedback for conscious leadership development. Elena integrates principles of Conversational and Emotional IQ and Systemic Team coaching with an Agile/Lean empirical approach to create a personalized holistic coaching
experience. Drawing on her years of training, mentoring, and coaching executives and teams in Agile transformation, she now serves as a trusted advisor for thought leaders who engage in digital transformation.
Elena is an experienced people development leader known for her ability to creatively align business strategy to people’s practices while keeping a passionate focus on workplace culture and values.
Elena is an ICF Certified Coach, ORSC, and AoEC Certified Systemic Team Coach, Certified Visionary Leadership Coach.
As the Scrum Alliance Certified Coach and Certified Agile Leadership Educator, Elena is teaching, training, and coaching teams and individuals to become great Agile professionals and Agile leaders. She brings together diverse and passionate voices dedicated to developing thriving workplace cultures, creating joy and value with the Agile approach, and embracing the agile mindset in work and life environments.
Elena works with leaders and teams around the globe, helping them engage in digital transformation and mapping out powerful organizational shifts to create a sustainable culture focused on learning and innovation. She helps executives in global companies find alignment around cultural and social diversity and aligns around shared purpose, shared values, and business goals.
Elena blends her diverse experiences as a trusted advisor, professional consultant, coach, researcher, and VR documentary producer.

Alireza Boloorchi

PhD in Computer Science

Alireza Boloorchi is passionate about efficiency for the whole. He believes leadership is about the courage in sacrificing localized efficiency for a greater goal. For the last 12 years, he has been helping several large and small organizations to adopt/adapt more efficient process using Agile/Lean values and principles.

He received his PhD in Computer Science and is Certified Scrum Professional by Scrum Alliance. His experience is rooted in software engineering followed up in roles such as Scrum Master, Agile coach, ENT Agile coach, and leadership in Agile organizations.

He has worked/consulted in several industries such as Finance, Game, Semiconductor, manufacturing , etc. Academia has been an important part of his professional life, and He is researching and teaching Agile in the academia as an Adjunct Professor at Oklahoma State University. And serves as reviewer for several journals such as Journal of Super Computing, Network Systems, and Information Science.

Zach Bonaker

Benevolent Trouble-maker

Zach Bonaker is a “benevolent trouble-maker” based in San Diego, California, USA and has more than 10 years of experience assisting organizations with achieving their goals through improved working conditions and team-centric systems of work. With experience guiding Fortune 500 companies to multi-million dollar startups, Zach draws upon agile principles, relationships, and systems thinking to redesign structures into safe, collaborative environments. Zach is an international conference speaker, frequent podcast guest, and contributor to the global agile community. When he isn’t thinking about next-generation agile ideas, Zach can be found enjoying the sunny California weather and connecting with people all over the world.

Michael de la Maza

PhD, MIT, CEC, Co founder Demingway.com

Michael de la Maza is the founder of Heart Healthy Scrum and a Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC). Previously, he was VP of Corporate Strategy at Softricity (acquired by Microsoft in 2006) and co-founder of Inquira (acquired by Oracle in 2011). He is the co-editor of Agile Coaching: Wisdom from Practitioners and co-author of Professional Scrum with TFS 2010 and Why Agile Works: The Values Behind The Results. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from MIT.

Jeff Patton

Chief Troublemaker

Jeff Patton helps companies adopt a way of working that’s focused on building great products, not just building stuff faster. Jeff blends a mixture of Agile thinking, Lean and Lean Startup Thinking, and UX Design and Design Thinking to end up with a holistic product-centric way of working. Jeff is author of the bestselling O’Reilly book User Story Mapping which describes a simple holistic approach to using stories in Agile development without losing sight of the big picture.

Jeff’s a Certified Scrum Trainer, and winner of the Agile Alliance’s 2007 Gordon Pask Award for contributions to Agile Development. You can learn more about Jeff, and find essays and past writing from his columns with StickyMinds.com, Better Software Magazine, and IEEE Software on his website: jpattonassociates.com. 

Amitabh Sinha

Execution Strategy Advisor, CTC

Amitabh (Amit) Sinha is a servant leader entrepreneur, visionary, mentor, trainer and coach. Amit is highly passionate about Agile, it’s principles, values, and the human side. Amit is a people champion and strives to bring out the best in his teams. Amit leverages his expertise in Agile, Scrum, Kanban and people skills to increase team effectiveness and happiness.

Amit has had huge success in transforming teams, departments and organizations. He has led, coached, nurtured and trained hundreds of teams into high performance and happiness! Amit’s teams have often been noted for their high levels of exuberance. Amit helps Scrum Masters, Product Owners, leaders and executives understand the Agile mindset and how to create effective products that delight customers. 

Amit contributes to the community by speaking at various forums and meetups to share his knowledge and wisdom with others. He delivered a popular workshop on happiness and productivity at the global Agile conference August 2019(AA 2019, DC). Amit lives with his wife and three boys in Palo Alto, California.

Rakesh Sadhwani

Business Strategy Advisor

Rakesh Sadhwani is an entrepreneur, businessman, and technical leader who possesses a wealth of industry experience and know-how.  He currently serves as the CEO of an award winning, Bay Area technical staffing and solutions firm, Vertisystem. Rakesh’s expertise includes on-shoring and off-shoring, staff augmentation, business strategy, business development and creating valued partnerships.

What sets Rakesh apart as a leader is his dedication to the relationship first, his genuine commitment to the community, enabling his staff’, and a commitment to doing what is right.  Rakesh is a true partner who sincerely listens and endeavors to deliver value above and beyond your expectations. Rakesh lives with his wife and two daughters in Fremont, California.