Folks, I’ve made it – it’s been 2 months since I’ve lasted blogged, and that’s because I had been transitioning away from being paid to break expensive hospital equipment test medical devices in Andover, towards being paid to crush the spirits of insolent coders coach software development teams in Boston’s Fort Point district (by South Station).
I don’t always change careers, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis it’s exciting and a whirlwind of activity, from sending off and being sent off by my close-knit awesome team (and colleagues of 6 years), to welcoming and being welcomed by a couple of virtually-knit teams (half of my colleagues are in Romania!).
My first job was to reduce the number of unknown unknowns, i.e., yes, there’s an onboarding process to becoming a new employee (the formal stuff) and learning the social structures (the informal stuff) at a new place, so I’ve got to figure out what they even are to then address them.
My second job was to familiarize myself with the teams and the state of Scrum within each of them, i.e., learning Indian names and Romanian names, then how to pronounce them, then getting a sense of how much Scrum they know. Lucky for me, I’ve got a couple of crews that WANT to get better at this game. They LIKE the theory, and they WANT help with the practice. They’re smart and they push back on me, forcing me to lead discussions so everybody’s on the same page and willing to experiment with new processes.
It’s been trial by fire.
It’s been drinking from the firehose.
It’s been the starkly punctuated evolution of my wanting to be better at Scrum from leading a team of just me to now leading two teams of international team members.
It’s been trial by firehose trial by ScrumMaster.
I feel awesome, and since my theme song isn’t on YouTube yet, I’ll give you the next best thing.
Ladies and gentlemen, Kashmir by Led Zeppelin. You’re welcome.