Scrum Master

Using Lean and Agile practices, this role helps to drive business agility by delivering the innovative, high-quality products and services the organization needs to compete in an ever-changing world. This requires solutions and approaches that transcend and complement the typical Agile toolset, connecting work with value.

KEY CHALLENGES:

• Focusing exclusively on strategic / scaled agile approaches. The Scrum master must help the organization to apply agile concepts to the more strategic activities of an organization, to avoid the trap common to those organizations that adopt an execution-based agile transformation. At the same time, they must resist the urge to prioritize agile execution for all work, and expect all work to be delivered using the same approach. This risks marginalizing and potentially eliminating traditional planning, funding and execution approaches that are still critically important to many departments across virtually every organization.

• Ignoring financial governance. Agile approaches often elevate funding models to the program or product level rather than the team or project level. That’s appropriate and this bulk funding approach can make financial management both more effective and more efficient. However, it shouldn’t mean giving agile teams a blank check, it’s not the freedom to consume the allocated investment without any form of control.

• Failed resource management improvements. One of the common promises of agile transformations is that it will simplify the ability to manage resources and improve resource utilization percentages by establishing stable, dedicated teams in place of the fluid resource demands of serial project delivery. That may occur, but agile transformations can also add complexity to resource management. Resource planning is different in an agile environment, and those differences must be accommodated with flexible resource management tools combined with an integrated approach to all investment and work types.