Collaboration is essential

Collaboration is an essential practice in agile teams. Scrum Masters realise that a collaborative community can best solve complex problems. But how do scrum masters themselves collaborate? We often hear about how scrum improves collaboration (overall), but how do scrum masters help bring about change in organisations? They do this in several ways. This article shares how that works and what scrum masters do in scaled agile environments to improve their collaboration for the betterment of their organisation.

Collaboration provides organisations with powerful, driven, and focused teams. There are several benefits that collaboration can provide organisations, namely:

1. Enhancing productivity
2. Cultivates innovation
3. Encourages bonding
4. Improves morale
5. Encourages flexibility
6. Focuses on outcomes
7. Encourages employee engagement
8. Improves working relationships and work culture overall
9. Increases ROI

Scrum masters improve collaboration between one another and across various segments of the organisation in different communities of practices (CoP).

As agents who foster collaboration wherever they go, scrum masters are seen as supporters and facilitators of a system of interconnected, collaborative communities inside organisations. Organisations rely on the competence of scrum masters as enablers of collaboration. Scrum Masters are artisans of collaboration, networking, and building synergies.

Why do scrum masters collaborate?

Scrum masters gather information about how they can improve their performance and skills through any of the following ways:

1. To receive a second opinion (from developers, other scrum masters, etc.)
2. Learning from one another via breakout sessions, one-to-ones
3. Exchange with internal (colleagues) and externals (trainers)
4. Developing their agile mindsets via workshops, training, etc.

To receive a second opinion

Scrum masters require constructive, supportive feedback. A second opinion can make a big difference in their day-to-day work. We need feedback because:

• We consider ourselves to be too positive
• Our perception is selective and distorted

Feedback can:

• Prevent us from making significant mistakes
• Help motivate one another
• Promote our personal and professional growth
• Please help us build stronger relations with one another

Giving and receiving feedback is practically an art; training others to do it will improve the overall robustness of your organisation’s communication practices. Scrum Masters get a second opinion of the process flow, product insight, and even collaboration suggestions/recommendations from their peers and developers, product managers, and product owners. This helps the scrum master situate their work in context with others to drive solid, streamlined improvements that will benefit their teams and others.

Learning from one another

A Scrum master constantly seeks ways to improve his/her craft, skills, and engagement with his/her teams and organisation. This means that the scrum master learns from whoever he/she is in contact with, often receiving feedback or one-to-one coaching from managers, architects, and developers.

Another way scrum masters learn from one another is by exchanging their teams–a scrum master joins another scrum masters team, either as an auditor (witnessing how the scrum master behaves and things that he does) or as an actual interim participant in the team (replacing the current scrum master for a brief time). It is quite a bold move to bring another scrum master to the team, and they may even end up favouring that scrum master. Before exchanging scrum masters, the team must be aware that you are an interim scrum master and that you are there to learn about how the team operates and performs. Not all scrum masters favour this idea! So, scrum masters must first „negotiate“ the boundaries of engagement.

Scrum masters may collaborate to build workshops, be present in workshops they do, and organise training for specific objectives. Scrum masters may review their team’s goals together and request a second opinion about some of the benchmark performance indicators.

Exchange with internal (colleagues) and external personnel

Scrum Masters participate in several ways in internal and external environments to improve their competence and skills. For example, inside an organisation (internally), a scrum master coffee could be organised to create an open, informal dialogue between scrum masters over a fresh cup of coffee. They may do this weekly, for 30 minutes, for example, to learn about how teams are performing, what impediments are being resolved by scrum masters, and even the result of some dependencies (good, bad, just ok?).

Scrum Masters can create a Slack channel (internally) or an MS Teams Group to share urgent information about a team’s impediment, behaviour, etc. Additionally, I’ve seen scrum master mailing lists where they inform each other of their absences from work (maybe vacation, health issues, etc..) and may request the support of other scrum masters in the organisation to help their teams during their absence.

In medium to large enterprises with more than ten teams, I’ve witnessed some extravagant confluence pages that scrum masters created for their teams. There, in these team pages, scrum masters share the knowledge gained by the team, the product these teams develop, the skillsets of the team members, and even sacred documents like the retrospective (although it is a contentious topic to publish them in some ways), sprint planning, sprint review, and the rest of the scrum events. Scrum Masters asked to take over some teams and may find these team pages helpful!

It’s important to keep these team pages purpose-driven and not too detailed.

Here is a recap for those Scrum Masters who want to improve their collaboration internally:

• Set up a scrum master coffee → get the latest facts about teams from one another; perhaps 30 minutes is enough
• Create an internal communication channel (e.g. Slack or MS Teams Group) → share urgent information, knowledge, and a status to the rest of the scrum masters in your company (often informal)
• Create a mailing list (distribution list) for scrum masters →  Scrum Masters can use this opportunity to communicate absences, urgent concerns and needs and request another scrum master to take over during their absence (often formal)
• Create team profile pages → This allows scrum masters to communicate the team’s journey, centralise the team’s development efforts, and document information for scrum masters. Scrum Masters may, from time to time, look at this documentation and share feedback.

There are also things you can do to acquire that external interaction that you aren’t finding in your organisation–the expertise that comes from cross-organisational dialogue. For example, I am a member of different „meet-ups“, which I found on meetup.com, where I engage in different social circles to develop my scrum master competence. I am also a member of some Slack communities, such as my favourite, “Product Coalition,” which has over 5000 members led by Jay Stansell. One can exchange with several scrum masters and gain their expertise on some of the scenarios that are playing out in your organisation.

Develop the scrum master agile mindset.

Nothing is more important than developing an increasingly flexible, spontaneous and perceptive mind known as the ‚agile mindset‘. The scrum master develops their agile mindset through the continual practice of agility by focusing more on the principles of agility and the manifesto before anything else. The scrum master develops a non-sticky mind that is free of processes and the constraints of tools and plans in favour of systematic, disciplined, and non-rigid approaches towards team and personal development. To be able to do this, the scrum master not only trains their team in simplicity and the art of work but also trains them in values and principles and provides a disciplined, structured and organised approach to work.

The scrum master develops their agile mindset by engaging in increasingly external and internal work activities. The scrum master is typically, then, incredibly determined to set agility in their team and throughout the organisation, acting as an agility agent. The scrum master does this by instituting communities of practice (CoP) to develop competencies and to practise agility in different groups. The scrum master may also lead change activities inside their organisation by being, perhaps, an auditor and a force of agility to remind teams and those in non-agile environments to work and operate agilely.

The scrum master is also a purveyor of the agile mindset by providing resources, presentations, seminars, and workshops and writing articles, journals, and seminaries to share and disseminate agility throughout various sectors, branches, and institutions worldwide.

The scrum master internalises agility and practises it daily, transforming themselves and those around their social circle. This individual knows what is important and why doing this is essential. This allows the scrum master the flexibility not only to create and innovate processes but also to clarify purpose and direct people and teams towards achievement rather than institute process dependencies throughout their lives and their companies.

Conclusion

The scrum master constantly develops his/her skillsets in collaborative competence, leadership, and mentoring through perpetual exchange with other scrum masters and those external to his/her environment. The scrum master is a skilled navigator of people, building relationships and opening up opportunities to acquire new knowledge, develop old skills, and innovate new ways of sustaining and improving existing relations with their peers. The scrum master needs consistent, timely exchange through a rewarding feedback culture to bring awareness to the forefront of their endeavours.

The scrum master, through collaboration with their peers, can cast a net of inclusion that makes those involved in the system move with greater ease and purpose.