Kristy Stein

I first had an opportunity to use agile at Delta Air Lines IT under tight mandated due dates by the FAA.  The project that I was on required multiple iterations and feature builds where you would build one feature, test and implement, then build the second.  The PNRGOV program took 3 years to build the model for interacting and sending necessary information to dozens of different countries in the FAA approved format.  Doing these short sprints allowed for timely redirections when government applications needed to communicate with one another.  Acting as a SCRUM Master I was able to work closely with both IT and Business allowing for our  IT development to be aligned to business goals by managing daily stand ups and using the prioritization from the Product Owner to help drive the PNRGOV program forward.  There were multiple impediments in this project that required outside influence during infrastructure setups between each country.  Helping with these blocks and clearing these issues helped my team move forward with each feature build.  

My second position as a Project Manager was at Cargill.  I say Project Manager because Scrum Master was not a viable option at that time.  Cargill was working on a large IT transition from onshore employees and moving a large portion over to TATA.   I had the opportunity to try to utilize SCRUM for our RNET project which would have been ideal since it was a timely global effort of sun setting a hardware and application that was used for long distance communication.  The SCRUM failed before it could even start for the following reasons: I did not have leadership buy in.  I was only dedicated 30% as were my team members whom all had different priority projects.  Most importantly Cargill was experiencing a large amount of attrition where it wasn’t uncommon to lose a SME making it very difficult to move forward with SCRUM.  I ended up using waterfall because the above criteria could not be met at that time.  The project was successful albeit it 4 weeks behind the original business end goal. 

My most current Scrum Master role has been with Allianz where I've had the privilege of being there during the transition of waterfall to SCRUM.  I'm currently apart of the Agile Council that meets on a monthly basis to discuss SCRUM and Agile and Allianz.  I am also a part of a SCRUM Guild and weekly Scrum Master Forums that promote Scrum autonomy where best practices are shared and current grievances against process and release management are shared and discussed.  These ideas thus far have promoted process changes in the way we document and the types of documentation saving the team a lot of rework.   It’s been great to see how the SCRUM Master Position and SCRUM projects have evolved at Allianz.  With leadership support I can see this only getting better!  

I agree that the best SCRUM experience you can obtain is by actively working a SCRUM Master position; however I also learned that without community through attendance of training and various agile gatherings it is difficult to improve as a SCRUM Master.  Also choosing to read articles, forums and agile books can force you out of your box and help you renew your thought.  By doing this over and over I can continue to grow and bring new experiences to my teams. 

One of my favorite professional books currently is the Phoenix Project.  Although the book never mentions agile it gives examples throughout the stories of how the people change the way they work.  Such as using Kanban and other boards to track progress from To Do, WIP, and then to Done.  It also demonstrates how different departments with different agendas can also work together.  I also liked this book because it is in a story level format where the reader can become invested in the characters and walk away with multiple lessons without feeling completely preached to.  I highly recommend it to anyone that wants a big picture on the benefits of agile.  I find that Patrick Lencioni does this similarly in his books to where the reader leaves with a different understanding, a new perspective and different questions to ask.  Ending on this note, through experience and conscience effort we learn different ways to teach, promote and question both ourselves and our team to help drive the team forward to continued growth and success.