Learning from Expert Scrum Masters

When I examined a few experience scrum master, I notice a pattern.

I notice that they recognize the distinction among all these skills  and mindful of when to exercise all these skills effectively.

I have captured all these skills( Training, Teaching, Mentoring and Coaching) skills through Mindmap.

Over a period of time, they have mastered these skills.

They may be excellent at domain knowledge but all these skills they have polished.

When I am coaching I consider for all these skills maturity and encourage the scrum masters to polish these skills as a part of their scrum master journey.

Do you recognize the commonality among all these skills? Most of these skills are soft skills.

It takes years to achieve mastery of these skills.

You can also read some more about these skills.

For sure we are looking for the Scrum Master or Agile Coach who are working to polish all these skills.

What do you think?

One latest review in at Amazon about the Agilist guidebook, thanks to Bharat for sharing his remarks about the book, I am yet to find Bharat in my network, thanks to the reader like Bharat who inspires the author to compose further, acknowledge the effort invested by the author.Happy to discover many such readers.

How Socrates would have read The Agilist’s Guidebook?

Socrates would read one chapter, but then he will take a moment and challenge himself how this applies to his life, and what he can do to think better.

Socrates had a method to his genius, and that process was straightforward: Ask questions.

Socrates was a scholar, and he instructed his students to ask questions.

He told his student to Take the time to think about their problems and any other thing in their life. He explains not just blindly accept what they hear or read, think about it.


Draw his/her own resolutions and understand where they can continue from there.

When his student read The Agilist’s Guidebook, they will think through and analyze everything. Most of their problem can minimize through this approach.

According to Socrates while reading a book, give it a pause every now and then. Analyze how this concept can solve some of your own problems? what action you can take about what the author has shared.

Sit down and Read, and figure out below questions while reading the book,

• Whatever I am reading is it significant to my work?
• Why I am reading these chapters?
• How much you acknowledge with these concepts?
• What action I can take if it is applying to my life?
• Am I able to understand all the facts what the author is trying to communicate through this book?
• If the concepts are not applicable, in future these approaches will useful for me?
• Can I practice and demonstrate this to someone else?
• Have you already thought through and implemented about these concepts earlier? How did it function?
• Are you agreeing with the author? if not, do you think if you have a stronger means to deal with the situation?
• What do you think about the author’s story or journey look like?
• In what way you can compose better about these chapters?
• Do you think is there any other better way this chapter/concepts could have committed? with better examples?

Please have a look at The Agilist's Guidebook

Change Management steps for Change leaders

If you try to google search "Agile coaching and transformation books", you will get my book, The Agilist's Guidebook. You get a glimpse of Transformation challenges from my book.10% discount in Amazon with free shipping.

Building Personal Leadership

When I commenced composing about my book, The Agilist’s Guidebook, my focus area was Organizational Agile Transformation challenges.

My purpose was to capture all the issues I had experienced and thereafter I wish to reuse those in my forthcoming endeavors.

As I organizational challenges are moving targets and there many such challenges when I started capturing all those, can develop into an epic! And in my next book, I should highlight something else.

One of the comments which Dr. Rajeeb Jha, Consultant in Germany, shared has changed my way of thinking and pushed my book to a diverse set of readers.

Why only Software Developers community, this universal challenges can be used by any individuals to any field to improve self and become a stronger leader.

Just have a look at the chapters and they are so generic concepts anyone will get benefit out of these concepts.

Let us share this with all and develop each other. It does not cost much to experiment with this book.

One more comment from Niraj Bhandari, Product Manager , Indeed.com, Japan also on similar line echoed the same.

Few of the chapters which talks about developing self

Rajeev comments

The Agilist's Guidebookk can be used for Personal Leadership development,

This comment from Dr Rajeev Jha, changed my way of thinking...

Comment from Germany

My first book comment for Amazon Germany! Dr. Rajeev has read my book and shared his valuable remarks. I am indebted for his time and feedback.

Sriharsha comments: The Agilist's Guidebook

My First book comments from London!! One of the best comment so far I have ever received. Love this reader for his writing proficiency. I cherish the passion Sree has been revealing. His commitment to becoming better on a regular basis is magnificent. It inspires me as a writer when I have such a reader. There’s no dearth of words from his expression, there is abundance in his thought while appreciating others works, he looks for possibilities and digs deeper into the work product by using his optimistic glasses.

I admire this attitude. For certain one day you can be a writer, I recognize you will write..…thanks for your time and effort.

When I run out of the Cave!

When I first read about the THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE, I thought for a moment and start thinking how can I apply this concept in my own life and my work.

It is a short excerpt from the beginning of Plato’s book, The Republic.

Plato explains that a man who is a slave is born in a cave and spends his entire life chained inside the cave.

He has never had any experience in the open and has never even seen the sun except through a small opening that comes into the cave just a few hours every day.

During these brief encounters with the outside world, he and his fellow slaves see shadows of birds flying on the cave wall, and the slave gets curious.

One day, he breaks his chains and runs to the opening of the cave to see the outside world for the very first time.

He sees real birds with feathers flying through the air and is amazed. So excited, he returns to his fellow slaves to explain what he has seen.

Of course to the slaves, a bird is not a feathered, flying animal. It is a black spot that hovers on the rocks a few times a day.

To them the shadow is their reality of what the bird is, and they think that the returning slave has gone mad. He is so uprooting their reality of what truth is that they have to stop him, and the mob kills him.

Socrates says, “An unexamined life is not worth living.”

This metaphorically represents our arduous ascent to higher learning.

It calls for our undying drive for the truth.

The prisoner that escaped from the cave questioned all his beliefs as he experienced a change in his view of the world rather than just being told an alternative.

Being a passive observer, as the prisoners who wish to stay in the cave, would generally prefer to keep things as they are.

According to Plato, education is seeing things differently
Plato's point is that the prisoners would be mistaken. For they would be taking the terms in their language to refer to the shadows that pass before their eyes, rather than (as is correct, in Plato's view) to the real things that cast the shadows.

If a prisoner says "That's a book" he thinks that the word "book" refers to the very thing he is looking at. But he would be wrong. He's only looking at a shadow. The real referent of the word "book" he cannot see. To see it, he would have to turn his head around.

As Scrum Master, I was passionate to go out of the prison and explore the world. My experience, I have started noting down for myself.

I was getting better value when I shared the original story from my experience with others. I commenced working out the same more and more.

I believe we all require to explore the experience as a Scrum Master or Agile coach or Product owner in real time.

Let us go out of the prison by working out level best and explore the real Sun, not the shadow.

You can read about more stories of my life from the book, The Agilist's Guidebook.

The Agilits's guidebook reach to 240!

At the closure of 5 months, the Agilist’s Guidebook has launched, The Publisher shared the statistics that there are 240 readers have chosen to read this book and own this book. There are readers who are reading and sharing observations with others and I am grateful to all who are supporting me and Spreading the awareness about this book(Directly and indirectly). All my reader’s comments are accessible at Amazon and The Agilits’s Guidebook landing page. I choose to carry out different in other’s thought through this book. A slight dent is adequate to create another writer. It is a magnificent feeling when someone reads, what you write. It is an awesome feeling when someone read and comment, when you write.

If you Google search “Agile Coaching Books”, You see all the needed books which all we should read. You see my book also , “The Agilist’s Guidebook” !!! Gratitude to all colleagues and Google to bring it to all!

Book Readers comments.....

Points from few of my ardent readers. There are many more remarks, I just picked few, thanks for your devotion to know and distribute the stories to other aspiring readers.

Comments from Ash

40 Review comments

Today The Agilist’s Guidebook got 40 review comments from those passionate book readers who cares for others. This will encourage diverse readers to determine if this book to be any benefit or not. The book landing page (theagilistguidebook.blogspot.com) has some further message. This book has come to this stage by assistance from the community member like you. It would be challenging for me to compose, push and bring light for this book without your encouragement. Thanks for all who are invariably promoting others to look into this book.

https://www.amazon.in/Agilists-Guidebook-Reference-Agile-Transformation/product-reviews/9387456641/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_viewopt_srt?showViewpoints=1&sortBy=recent&pageNumber=1

Why individuals seek for ready-made solution?

This is a typical phenomenon in most of the workshop.

Individuals show up to the workshop and demand there will be someone who will provide them a magic pill which will solve their problems!!!

Most of the workshop hijack with such problem they were facing, sometime we also felt that they need a platform where they want to vent out their challenges.

Most of the time they are not eager to discover their own solution!
Only a few percentages are ready to experiment and try, the majority are seeking for a ready made solutions!

Though as a coach we work with them to change the mindset.

I was thinking to detect this answer, Why? Why the majority are like this?

• Fear of the Unknown
• Lack of resources
• Individuals choose to gain pleasure and avoid pain
• They do not discover “Why” 
• What is the bigger picture?
• The individual is not willing to learn and going beyond the prescribed boundary.
• The ecosystem is not ready to admit failure and not free from the blame culture
• Few passionate pessimistic individuals are spreading negative energy on a daily basis

Most of the transformation assignment, I identify these typical patterns. Team members do not take action because of all the above reason.

Once we discover in some teams where individuals are performing reasonably better, I could understand all these typical characteristics are missing by the team members.

Without action, you aren’t going anywhere– Gandhi

How do we change? 

• For any adjustment to take place, someone has to figure out something and start executing differently
• Massive problems are most often solved by an array of small solutions over a longer duration of time; sometimes over weeks and occasionally over decades.
• A desire to provide crystal clear direction on what specifically individuals should start doing, stop doing or continue doing
• We must need to single out the applicable behavior. Most often it must be a positive feeling,
• We must establish that the change or task won’t be unusual big and dreadful 

My book, The Agilist's Guidebook, has 88 problems and solutions!! 

For those who want to discover my journey and reuse some of those steps. Please read.

Why we need Agile Consultants for Major Agile Transformation?

A tale from my companion.

My companion is an Agile coach in one of the product based company. She is responsible for Agile transformations for the numerous team for a Business line. She is reporting to the business line head.

She is coaching many teams and over a period of time she realizes that bringing cultural changes; it need some structural changes. And those changes can come from top leadership.

Any change initiatives she is proposing for organization transformation to bring agility,those ideas review through the business line Head. 

Anywhere business line Head is anticipating some elements which are causing threats to his existing structure and people, those proposals are not getting approved.

In a similar company in another business line, there are also agile coaches but only distinctions are business line head is from overseas and driving the transformation from there with many reputed consultants working with that business portfolio.

Similar types of the proposal are getting approved and significant organizational changes are taking place to accomplish enterprise agility.

To save her job as she is under the payroll of the company under that business line head, she is not able to show Scrum Value- Courage!!!

Recently One person lost his job by demonstrating courage.
His change management approach was approved but the reason to get rid of him was unusual.

It has generated a scary situation under change management team.

Every coach is doing business as usual. 

There is a talk to bring external consultant, who are temporary and can influence, propose many pilot initiatives. Most of the consultants are for 6-12 months contracts. They are bold and pursue to top executives for change initiatives. Most of the time it works!!

My friends say in her 2 years stay with that product company she has seen many consultants who come and goes but they bring a lot of new, innovative change proposals and many got triggers top management to change. And it works!! But employee from the payroll lost all the courage to propose such initiatives!

It constitutes a thought in-house change initiative if it is a major organizational change management, not healthy for employees? or better to do such risky changes by the consultants and business as a usual part take care by the in-house coaches. 

Risk-independent transformation!
Have you come across such story ?

What I have learned from my few master coaches

I have worked with few great coaches whom I consider to be the role model coaches. They have inspired me to perform and better and continuously improve.

They are constantly excelling themselves and stimulating others to raise towards the sky.

• We require to Prove, define, exhibit repeatedly, practice and provide valuable comment to the team members whom we are coaching.
• Team member listens when the coach listens to them.
• Let us holistically challenge team members mental skills. They can be cultivated just like we develop physical skills.
• Inspire the team members to be all they can be, every day and in all that matters.
• Body language replaces many expressions: It is not what we say, but how we express it. Our attitude and thoughts reflects in our delivery.
• Praise and positive reinforcement are mechanisms for the coach.Let us keep using these appropriately
• Self-reflection is our eternal companion: we are our own strongest critic but seek to be objective rather than self-destructive. Pessimism is also a big killer!
• Take interviews and throwback answers. Challenge the team members to identify the answers for themselves and to understand lessons.
• Desire: protect the dream alive, daily. Motivation is a attitude, not a one-off incident.
• Let us construct a healthy, challenging, interesting coaching environment where team members enjoy coming to gain and grow.
• Constantly challenge self and the team members for different peak to accomplish.
• Look for actions to develop in self, Deep observation is the key.
• Provide an ounce of instruction and a bundle of practice to be execute. Let them get experience from the execution.
• Persistence pays–never give up.
• What we believe will take place, will crop up. What the mind can envision it will bring about.
• Strive to establish self as an redundant and develop coach independent professionals.
• Listen with the eyes and look with the ears.
• Raise their standards of achievement and career aspirations to scary heights.
• Redesigned how team members precious moment, attention and energy is devoted.
• Eliminate those once-important practices and routines that no longer benefit them effectively.
• Challenge and left bare team members most intimately held beliefs and assumptions.

• Gain a vastly magnified view of the team members amazing strengths and capacities.

• Rediscover team members lively, creative side that had long been detained in exile.

Why Proxy Product Owner is Relevant?

We all are aware that the Proxy Product Owner(PPO) is an anti-pattern. 

There is no such role called proxy product owner.

but we notice this role still survive and continue to remain!!

Should we eliminate this role?
Should we deliberately create this role?
Does this role not add any value at all?
Does this role create a Chinese whisper syndrome?

Couple of teams I have observed there is a legitimate demand for this role. After tried several attempts to establish real product owner, but failed in the attempt due to the circumstance. And circumstance is so powerful , we are not able to change, but the system continues to run with PPO as efficient as possible!

Most of the time, we obtain a terrible point to persuade business to provide PO. We are ready with coaching and training for the business communities for on-boarding a new role called PO. But we do not get. In Traditional IT organization BA used to accomplish all this activity. Now Agile way of working, Business is not ready as fast as demanded. so some PPO gets created to do someway to do Agile. We call this role as Powerless PO( PPO)!!

I have a feature team, where we have full stack team members. The feature team supports business for Hongkong, Singapur and Malaysia business. Business from each location does not eager to identify one person as a PO for this job, as requirement is very limited. From IT side one person playing the Proxy PO role and enabling all the business stakeholders to fulfill the regular demands and delivery requirements. It works fine and business is happy with this setup.Powerless PO( PPO)!! works.

One more typical scenario, one product line named as Costarica, where Business has identified one person as a PO, But she is managing many other products and an extremely knowledgeable individual. She does not have so much time, she is spending 10% of her effort for the Feature team named Costarica product. And Feature team has one senior BA who is supporting all the requirement engineering side and communicating with PO for all the expected support required. PO decides but BA who is Powerless PO( PPO) enables all to be on the same page.Powerless PO( PPO) works.

One more typical scenario, I have one Feature team where business is in Germany, most of the users are in Germany. A feature team members are in India. None of the team members knowGerman! One of the Sr. BA we have hired who has domain expertise and knows German. It has become a gift for the team members to interface with business and users. We established that BA as a PPO will interface with the business and PO. Though the PO knows English and is in Germany, PPO enables the team to perform better.Powerless PO( PPO) works.

We were once become very strict and determined that we should eliminate PPO from the system, but once we realize many such typical scenarios; we started asking, does this PPO role not add any value? causing inconvenience to the agile team? Maybe yes, maybe no.

Though we are not some time finding an excuse not to look systemic and figure out the tremendous obstacle we are having by not eliminate PPO. 

PPO does not exist in scrum role, but it can be traceable in the Agile system!!!!

Let us Develop Awesome Scrum Masters

India is a homeland of many impressive software product and service companies.

We are producing billions of dollars in software exports.

In an Agile way of building software there are enormous responsibilities on our scrum masters.

All the billion dollar exports, substantial assistance comes from our on floor scrum masters who are carrying out work with the team to deliver right quality software.

Business being the far away from the development team, Scrum Master carries an enormous responsibility.

Just 20 years back most of these responsibilities are on the shoulders of Project managers.

In Agile, Scrum Master to take care of most of these responsibilities.

We have to strengthen our scrum masters through Training, Coaching, and Mentoring.



Most of my Scrum Master interview I have noticed our scrum master has gained knowledge about scrum through certification and numerous conference and Meetup.

What I am finding, missing in Skills to execute real scrum mastery.

These skills can be strengthen by indulging into real-time challenges. or through Large scale complex product delivery. 

One of my friends was explained that in their organization they developed all these soft skills through Advance scrum mastery workshop where they discussed mainly 

a) People challenges around scrum master:- e.g.
How do I inspire my team members?
How do I motivate my team members?
How do I engage my team members?
How can I educate business about Product Backlog management?

b) Inter and Intra team alignment:- e.g.
How to do I facilitate multiple team collaboration?
How to do I bring several team members on one page?
What tool I should apply to bring all of them on the same page?
How do I take some initiative so that team members love to participate, contributes to scrum events?

c) Conflicting decision making:- e.g.
How to do I resolve the conflict among team members?
How to do I manage conflict among multiple PO whom I am working with?
How do I encourage people to experiment and shield team on failure?
How do I monitors, manages and escalates impediments, risks, and dependencies?

d) Leadership management:- e.g.
How do I help my senior leaders to buy-in an Agile way of working?
How do I help my project Managers to understand value-based delivery model?
How do I Create learning platforms and ensure by influencing self-learning with team learning?
How do I eradicate command and control style to servant leadership style?

e) High-performance team: e.g.
How do I understand the team dynamics?
How do I help my teams and team members to increase productivity?
How do I build a shared purpose?
How to build a Safe environment for the team?
How do I bring a lot of energies to the work and spread the same?
How do I foster team responsibility, self-accountability, transparency, and self-organization?
How can I act as a buffer between external distractions to minimize disruptions?

f) Large-scale facilitation and collaboration:- e.g.
How do I enable organizational impediments through the common meeting?
How do I minimize team dependency?
How do I prepare what guidelines to follow to minimize dependency?
How do I bring changes through impact full retrospection?
How can I able to work influentially with a wide range of colleagues and stakeholders across the various business?

g) Managing tough customer and business:- e.g.
How to do I deal with tough Product owners, Business?
How do I help them by bringing transparency?
How do I influences the organization in the removal of organizational impediments and development of healthy Agile practices?
What metrics to measure and why?
How do I enable Communication, Collaboration, and co-operation with Business?

h) I am a Passionate Scrum Coach: - e.g.
How do I become a better coach for my team?
How do I become Scrum Coach for the organization?
How do I know techniques how to protect the team from an external power pressure?
How can I Assess the Scrum Maturity of the team; organizes and coaches the team to higher levels of maturity at a sustainable/comfortable pace at certain intervals? 

i) Quality engineering:- e.g.
How do I inspire the team to follow XP and software engineering best practice?
How do I encourage and showcase team capabilities to other team members to follow the same?
How do I demonstrate strength in logical, creative problem-solving skills and excellent analytical skills?
How Can I Manage technical debt and prioritization of technical debt resolution without conflicting with business priorities?
How Can I Perform postmortem and root cause analysis to promote continuous improvement and maximizing productivity?

and many softer aspects which require to strengthen to drive critical product delivery.
If scrum masters are not effective, we missed implementing being agile elements in the team. We missed making a high-performance team.
I have discussed many such issues in my book...The Agilist's Guidebook

Comments from Jaya S

It is an undoubtedly encouraging moment for me to get the comment from Jaya Madam. Thanks for your time spent on reading my book and sharing your thoughts to the bigger community. We magnify our learning by sharing and caring for each other. Whatever we are challenges we dealing with in transformation adventure which could be absolutely context specific but by sharing with all, our known known areas are improving. Of course there will be unknown unknown which we discover as a community together by sharing our experience with all.

This Book has 5 Chapters , 288 pages, 60 mind-maps, 20 pictures, 6 case studies, 88 Questions and Answers, Key takeaways.

The Agilist's Guidebook

Delighted to look at my book, The Agilist’s Guidebook listed when I did a google search by writing- Agile Coaching Books.

The Agilist's Guidebook

The First chapter is all about developing coaching skills by practicing all these below points by taking actions against each item.

Question to be asked, What Can I do to become better at coaching? What action can I take to deepen my knowledge of coaching?

Akhilesh is a splendid manager with whom I have worked for a transformation assignment for 2 years. One of the toughest agile transformation assignment where I could be able to obtain tremendous challenges to explore in my career. That assignment has shaken all my skills! thanks to that assignment and Akhilesh has aided me a lot in that project, we have co-traveled in that transformation journey. Readers will get some glimpse of those challenges in the book, but will never be able to make out the pain what we have passed through!! Thanks, Akhilesh for the comments and assistance! Together we go and sail many nautical way forward!!

The Agilist's Guidebook : Hard copy Book Demo