My name is Elena, and I work as a Scrum Master and Agile Coach. These are both positions that can be interpreted and lived completely differently depending on the company and the individual. In a series of articles, I want to provide insight into the work and interpretation of my role at Hausgold.

Background:

Before starting at Hausgold around 3 years ago, I faced exactly the question posed in this post: What am I actually doing here? And above all, why am I doing this?

If I let ChatGPT answer this question, I get the following response:

An Agile Coach is a person who supports organizations, teams, and individuals in implementing, improving, and optimizing agile principles and practices in their work.

A Scrum Master is a key role in an agile development team working under the Scrum framework. The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring that the Scrum team effectively follows the principles and practices of Scrum and achieves its goals.

AHA. So, let’s get started.



postit

Put on the agile glasses, quickly memorize the Scrum Masters’ principles, and off we go.

Regardless of whether the team wants it this way or whether the company is even ready for it (and it makes sense for it).

It was clear to me that I didn’t want to fill the role like this.

Therefore, as with any decent team development process, I first went into role clarification.

What does the team expect from me? What should be different now that there are the above-mentioned roles at Hausgold? These and a series of other questions then led me to the (for me) right track. Because what counts is the team. Not some principle or framework.

To this day, I repeatedly experience that the team itself can design the best solution.



group hands

Inspirations are always good, but by no means an invitation to blindly adopt them.

So I see myself as a kind of question juggler who asks the right questions at the right time to stimulate the team’s thoughts, challenge entrenched processes, or absorb important impulses from the team. Occasionally enriched with workshops that fit the current team challenges or knowledge impulses that the team may find exciting or helpful. Always with an open ear for every person in the company.

In addition to the expertise from the agile world, I believe that the psychological training of a Scrum Master or Agile Coach should be at least equally important. Depending on the interpretation of the role, perhaps even more important. I would rather describe the role as that of a team coach who can draw on agile knowledge if the situation requires it. But not because the title dictates it.



mental

P.S: By the way, we don’t work according to Scrum anymore. Do I need a new job title now?

Outlook:

In the next articles, I would like to share an excerpt from our team development processes. Developing values in the team, team health, or role-based work will be focal points. Here too, wishes are warmly welcome! Is there anything that interests you in this context? Then feel free to write to me at elena.heucke@hausgold.de.