Does a Mature Agile Team Need a Scrum Master? with Justin Thatil

Agile Coaches' Corner

This week, Dan Neumann is joined by his colleague Justin Thatil to talk about what good Scrum Masters do when an Agile Team reaches maturity.

In this episode, they discuss the features of the Emergent Collaboration Maturity Model, its stages, and how this relates to the role of the Scrum Master as a leader, facilitator, coach, manager, mentor, teacher, and change agent. A Scrum Master fills many roles; join Dan and Justin in this discussion to explore the benefits of having a Scrum Master and the risks of not having one.

Key Takeaways

• What does a mature Team look like?

• A mature Team knows how to self-organize and solve problems.

• A mature Team understands its purpose.

• A mature Team knows its members' strengths and features.

• Scrum Teams become self-managing Teams; they are always encouraged to experiment.

• Emergent Collaboration Maturity Model:

• The different stages in the Maturity Model are Unaware, Exploratory, Defined, Adoptive, and Adaptive.

• Justin shares the example of Patagonia.

• What is the value of having a Scrum Master in an Organization?

• The eight stances of a Scrum Master: servant-leader, facilitator, coach, manager, mentor, teacher, impediment remover, and change agent.

• A Mature Team is a high-performance Team.

• The Team must feel beyond happy about their work, pushing it further, wanting to constantly improve, and taking their work to the next level.

• A mature Team has reasonable forecasts and manages stakeholders’ expectations.

• Organizations are constantly experiencing changes and transformations.

• A Scrum Master can be working with a Team for an amount of time and during that period, many changes take place; the number of the Team’s members, the product, and the challenges that the Team faces, all of these can change. A mature Team takes on the task/challenge that is presented, and evolves and changes in order to find solutions.

• The Scrum Master’s accountability needs to be defined clearly.

• It is a serious misunderstanding to believe that if a Scrum Master is really good he can take multiple Agile Teams.

• What is a Scrum Master’s career path?

• The Leadership of the future looks like the role of a Scrum Master, a leader who brings the best out of the people that they work with.

Mentioned in this Episode:

The 8 Stances of a Scrum Master

Quality over Quantity: Squirrel Burgers

Learn more about Jacob Morgan

The Female Brain, by Dr. Louann Brizendine

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