Shortly after I began working at Wren Kitchens in September 2021, I was offered to undertake the role of Scrum Master (Simply called Team Lead at the time) for the team I was on, Planner Improvements (PIM, for short).

My expectations were that my work would be split between software development, and leading the team. I accepted that role, and come January 2022 the previous Scrum Master stepped out of the position for me to take control.

There were a lot of things I took into account before accepting the role, which I'll get into later on in this post, but I want to share the lessons I learned, and how PIM became the highest performing team across the IT department.

No team will perform well under stress

Stress leads to mistakes, which lead to tickets failing test, which lead to a hectic second half of a sprint. This was a normal occurrence in all of our sprints - this was due to a number of factors. I'll list the main reasons below:

• Tickets not being investigated & estimated correctly
• Planning more work than we could ever hope to achieve.
• Tickets not being split well enough.

In my case, solving the above issues went a long way to reducing the amount of stress around the team. I'll go more into detail in how each of these were solved in another blog post.

People can be easily influenced

When it came to giving estimates on tickets, members of the team could be influenced by other members and end up not stating the estimate they would've preferred in fear of sounding incompetent. For example, say I estimated a ticket to take 6 hours, but another member had thought it would take 12 hours, that member would choose to stay quiet and simply be influenced by me saying 6 hours.

We solved this by using a tool, https://www.planitpoker.com/, where everybody then had the chance to input their amount of time and we'd then question the hours people put forward, until we came to a point everybody was comfortable with.

It can be a very socially draining role

I was a very anti-social person in the past - I could easily go days without speaking with people, or just saying the bare minimum that I needed to. This was merely due to my lack of self-confidence, mixed with anxiety. Now, when taking on the Scrum Master role I knew I'd have to improve on this or else the team would suffer.

People love to hear praise

Everybody loves to hear praise, whether it's directly at them or if it's aimed towards one of their peers. I always found that if someone did a great job handling a project, or had great communication, then that praise would be given in a group environment, such as Sprint Retrospective. Everybody felt positive off the back of this, and others would also speak up to give their praise.

Condemn should be done as little as possible

Having to condemn someone for an action they took can be stressful, and leave a bitter taste. If you're ever in a position that you have to condemn people, always aim for that to be done in a 1 to 1 chat. Opposite to the above, listening to someone being condemned can create an awkward environment around the team.

In my time as a Scrum Master, I only had to condemn a person's actions once.

 

I have now, as of August 2022, left my position at Wren Kitchens. After announcing to my team that I was leaving all of the members that had been in PIM since before I took on the Scrum Master role told me that the environment around the team was much more pleasant than in the past, and was a genuinely nice place to be.