Agile Notes (No. 28)

I know. I know. It HAS been awhile. I had a bunch of health issues, the final stage was a back surgery in July. On my return to work October 3rd, the company I worked for had a pretty large layoff, me included. It is all good. Don’t worry (too much).

I “borrowed” this :) When I get to 500 subscribers I will change it. :)

Before we dive in, it would be SUPER helpful if you could like this note, drop a comment, share this on the Twitter machine or Linkedin and subscribe if you haven’t all ready. Is anyone alive out there?

This continuum consisted of 4-6 (7?) different companies. Privately owned company bought by another privately owned company. That company purchased by a publicly traded company. That company purchased by another public company. That public company went private (whole new board of directors) which is 5. (This might have been private equity but I am not positive). That privately held company was taken over by a different private equity firm - 6. Last year, they “sold” the business/product/service group to another company which is publicly held. But who really cares at this point? SEVEN companies in almost 13 years. This kind of tracks with industry/career trends of moving to a new job every 2 years.

I had a number of jobs in those almost 13 years. I started as a customer-facing project manager. I started to dabble in Scrum. I became a program manager. I never really understood the difference between project and program. I embedded as a dedicated project manager with an infrastructure (networks and systems) team where I ran Scrum but didn’t tell the team that is what we were doing. We delivered value. I dabbled in “security.” I was a release train engineer disguised as a program manager. I ran compliance audits. Lastly, I moved into a full time security role working mostly on big-C Compliance but started to drive security work that needed to get done as a result of audit “recommendations” (never “findings”). Lots of Agile/Scrum work sprinkled throughout. The last year or so it was decided we would implement SAFe - i.e. Scaled Agile. It was a case of Olympic-level sprinting on legs that could barely walk.

So, what’s next? I want to focus on being a full-time Scrum Master and not a part-time Scrum Master and full-time something else. Ideally, I want to have a couple of teams which will get me on the road to becoming an Agile Coach. Meanwhile, I have gone back to Lyssa Adkins’ AMAZING Coaching Agile Teams.

In the coming weeks I will share more insights from my second read (3rd if you add up all the times I have picked it up and flipped through it) as I try to ground myself in the coaching aspects of being a Scrum Master.

Thanks for reading. Please leave a comment. Tell me what you are interested in. Tell me where you are stuck. Maybe we can work through it together. Be sure to subscribe [FREE!] to receive new posts directly to you inbox.

And please share!