If like many others you have often wondered the same, read on! Or if you have any other questions on a Scrum Masters role and how they do their jobs, then this is the post for you.
I work as a Scrum Master at NewVoiceMedia . Here the development teams get 2.5 days every quarter for hack-a-thon. More details on this can be found here
Being a non-technical member it is difficult to take part as most hacks are technical. To set this right, six of us in the Agile Community of Interest decided to write a book as our hack! In 48 hours! What was this hack about? – well, it was to write a book on what it takes to be a Scrum Master! The aim was to publish an ebook at the end of the hack.
The team consisted of Helen Lisowski, Keith O’Sullivan, Martyn Frank, Rob Lambert, Steven Mackenzie and myself. My personal experience in this hack was absolutely fantastic. I have never enjoyed taking part in a hack project as much as in this. We normally don’t get an opportunity to work together as we are all in different teams. It was great to be able to brainstorm, discuss and build the book and publish it under the tight deadline.
These days anyone can write a book. Right? What makes it a good book though? When it is of value to someone. Of course as authors we would be happy to have published book against our name. But what would be the point if it did not deliver value to anyone. Thus the biggest driver was to write a book that can be valued and utilised by the agile community. This book was written with Scrum Masters in mind. But it will be of great help to anyone working in the agile community.
We wanted to share our knowledge and experiences with others like you. We thus proudly present our book ‘So you want to be a Scrum Master?’ We are all very proud and happy with the end result. We hope that you will find this useful in your professional lives. Do drop in a line if you have any comments.
You can download the book from leanpub here: https://leanpub.com/beascrummaster
Do read these excellent post by the rest of my co-authors:
Helen Lisowski: http://fluidworking.com/hackathon-project/
Keith O’Sullivan: https://medium.com/@keithos/so-you-want-to-be-a-scrum-master-2a06bff75f3f#.lke2bbh1m
Martyn Frank: https://frankcode.net/2016/04/20/how-a-hackathon-ended-in-co-authoring-a-book/
Rob Lambert: http://cultivatedmanagement.com/want-to-be-a-scrum-master/