My Professional Scrum Trainer Legacy: What Matters Most to Me?
Hello to all my Agile and Scrum enthusiasts!
I get asked a lot of questions, and I think the question of how I’d like to be remembered as a professional Scrum Trainer is definitely one I have thought about in the past and I would like to share my top three priorities that are important to me.
So, without further ado, let’s dive into the three things that matter most to me as a Professional Scrum Trainer!
Integrity
Let’s kick off with my numero uno - Integrity. Integrity is right at the top of my list. For me, it’s not just about doing the right thing. It’s about being seen to do the right thing. 💯
Sometimes, as a professional Scrum Trainer, you’re faced with decisions where it’s tempting to make easy choices, like marketing my classes in a particular way that might not resonate with my core beliefs or undercutting a competitor’s prices to snag a client. 🏅
But that’s not me. I prefer transparency and fairness, such as publishing all my rates on my website, for instance. I know this means that my competitors know what I charge, and they’re welcome to undercut me, but it also means that my clients know I’m honest and upfront from the very beginning.
However, I won’t do the same as some of my competitors because, to me, that’s morally unacceptable and goes against the Scrum values. It’s just not me.
Honesty and Forthrightness
The second thing that’s incredibly important to me is forthrightness. Being straightforward is key. I’m all about zeroing in on the truth and separating it from opinions.
When working with organisations, I focus on helping them understand not only what’s broken but also providing suggestions on how to fix it. I also strive to differentiate between the facts and my own opinions.
I know these suggestions may or may not work for them. What matters is the data and the facts - the unvarnished truth, which I hold in high regard. It’s of paramount importance to me.
Being Approachable and Helpful
The final point in my trifecta is my openness and willingness to lend a helping hand. I want people to remember me for my approachability and willingness to assist. People can approach me with their problems, and they know I won’t sugarcoat things.
However, I also won’t be unnecessarily harsh either. Instead, I offer straightforward advice backed by data and facts.
One of the services I’m most proud of is offering free 60-minute one-on-one consulting because people need help.
Many individuals I’ve worked with appreciate this service and keep coming back. I consider these relationships valuable, and I want to continue to help them.
This approach of mine stems from my time as a Microsoft MVP, where the aim was to provide free advice and consultation to whoever needed it.
Whether it’s a quick chat or a deep dive into a complex issue, I’m here to help. It’s about the free and open transfer of information, something I truly value.
At the end of the day, I’d love to be known as someone approachable. Despite being pedantic, I’m also pragmatic. But there’s a reason for my pedantic nature, which is the unchangeable fact that the learning process, according to Scrum principles, needs to be precise.
I’m always ready to help figure out ways to make things more effective within your organisation’s unique circumstances.
Interested in learning more about Scrum?
Join me in my Agile and Scrum courses, where we deep-dive into these values and more.
Can’t wait to see you there! 🚀
How would you like to be remembered as a professional scrum trainer? What three things matter most to you?
I guess the first one is integrity. I like to do the right thing. I like to be seen to be doing the right thing. I don’t like to be seen to be doing the wrong thing. I don’t like to do the wrong thing, not just be seen to do it right. Sometimes that comes with hard choices because it might be easier for me to market, for example, market my classes in a particular way that I don’t believe is morally effective. Probably is the like it’s not moral for me to do that.
I could have a policy whereby if a customer came to me and had a quote from another scrum trainer that maybe I know, right, that I could undercut their price in order to win the business. But I don’t do that. I have all of my rates published on my website. I do give people discounts, right, but I have all of my rates published on my website and that’s generally the rates that I quote.
So people know, even my competitors know how much I’m going to be charging and they’re welcome to undercut me, right? But I’m not going to do that to them because I think that’s morally repugnant within the bounds of where a bunch of people are trying to do the right thing. It’s not in keeping with the scrum values, right?
So yeah, that’s the first thing. Forthrightness, probably. Part of that comes from my ESD neural divergent, right? I don’t like things to be wrong. I feel like I’m reasonably good at separating out the difference between the data, i.e. what’s the truth of the matter versus what my opinions are on top of that.
So I’ll work with organizations and I’ll help them understand not only what’s broken but what my suggestion is for how to fix it, right? My suggestion might be right or might be wrong for them; they need to try it and see. But the data is the truth, and that’s really important to me.
Just in general, so that would be the second thing. I’d like people to think of me as somebody that they can come to with their problems. I’m not going to sugarcoat anything, but I’m also not going to poop on them. Does that make sense? If they’re doing something that is downright daft, for example, stack ranking all of their employees, right? I’ve seen that Microsoft did that many minutes ago.
The detrimental effects to a business, its organization, the ability for people to function is fairly well documented for those types of issues. So I can categorically say that’s a bad idea. Here is the effect it’s going to have in your organization. I’m not going to say that something’s good if it’s not.
But that comes back to that second one, right, of honesty and what are the facts. If you’re doing something stupid, you’re doing something stupid. Nothing I sugarcoat is going to make it unstupid, so what’s the point in the sugar coating when all that does is bring politics into the story? Whereas you can do something with that data of, okay, I understand this is a bad thing and I can do something with it.
So I feel like that ability for people to come to me, and that’s why I offer, you know, 60 minutes one-on-one consulting. Ultimately, I have people that I work with that keep coming back for that 60 minutes because not everybody uses it. So it’s fine until it’s a problem, it’s fine, right? It’s like air miles.
They keep coming back and they’ll ask me questions, they’ll describe a problem or situation in their organization, and I’ll give them advice. I’ll give them free consulting, right? Because they need help. They came on my training course; I built a relationship with them. I want to continue that relationship and I want to continue to help them, and I’m not going to charge them for that because that’s just me helping somebody out.
I think that kind of comes from my time as a Microsoft MVP, right? In order to be a Microsoft MVP, you’re not getting paid to do the thing that you do. The thing you get your MVP for is not stuff you get paid for; it’s basically for giving free advice and consulting to anybody who needs it, whether that be in the form of blog posts or conference talks or just talking to people or presenting the product and where things are buried.
It’s where the bodies are buried, right? It’s that free and open transfer of information that is really important to me. If you want to come and do a scrum.org class, then you know there’s a cost for doing a scrum.org class. But if you just want to come and have a chat with me for 30 minutes, go to my website; it’s free. Book a 30-minute chat, have a chat, talk about anything you like. We could talk about board games if you like; I don’t mind what it is.
Because I’m always happy to hear from people and chat to them. I think especially in this day and age, there’s too few places for people to go for help. If you’ve got good Google Foo or Bingfu, you can go find contexts on the internet where other things have helped other people, but they’re never the same as your context.
While I’m very good at finding code contexts that help me, like when I’m coding, I’ll be able to go find some code and then adapt it to what I need. I think that’s much harder when we’re talking about people and relationships and practices and how we work in organizations. Sometimes you want an expert to hear the story and then offer some advice.
I have a number of people that have literally, I met them coming through my classes, whether public or private, that keep coming back and we chat all the time. I’ve got one scrum master; in fact, he wasn’t a scrum master when I met him. He is now, and we have multiple chats a week just talking about things that are going on in the organization, how he could maybe do things differently. He talks about his wins, right?
Somebody to talk to about the things that you’ve been able to achieve and what’s the next thing I should be thinking of and was that a good idea, right? I think that’s something we all need.
So if there was one thing, like the top thing, it would be I’d like to be known as somebody who is approachable, even though I’m sometimes very pedantic, right? But approachable and able to separate out that pedantic nature of following the scrum guide, right? That pedantic part of learning something, i.e. the teacher mode, right? You’re learning something; you want a teacher to be pedantic because that’s how that works.
And the pragmatic side, which is, well, I’m trying to do this in my company and this is my situation, which means I can’t do this thing that you said would be a good idea. How else could I work at this? I’m not going to say, well, that sucks; you have to do it this way. I’m like, well, let’s figure out within the bounds of your organizational context what is some way that you can try and make things a little bit better, a little bit more effective.
That’s probably the main thing.
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