Rebecca Fuller

Rebecca Fuller - I was introduced to scrum in 2012 when working as a architect/developer on a BI Data Warehouse project for BUPA in the UK. We used TFS as our virtual whiteboard.

A couple of years later I got the opportunity to implement scrum when working as an architect on a BI Data Warehouse project for SDC, a Scandinavian bank data centre. Again I used TFS as the virtual whiteboard but this time it was even more important as our scrum team was split between the main office in Denmark and an outsourcing supplier in Romania. The project was deemed a success but more than that, it prompted the entire BI department to begin looking at working agile instead of waterfall. We were by no means perfect and this is definitely where I learned the majority of "what NOT to do!" At that time, acting as Proxy Product Owner, Scrum Master and Architect/Team Lead was much, much too much. 

After 18 intense months at SDC, I took a data architect role for Swedbank in Stockholm, Sweden. Still working scrum but this time as a scrum developer - much more chill! We used IBM's RTC as our scrum tool - I didn't like it as much as TFS, but it was okay for what I needed to do.

Commuting to Stockholm every week became tiresome much more quickly than I expected. After six months, I accepted when a head-hunter approached me to go to Maersk - they were having difficulties with their agile transformation and needed a strong scrum master. At Maersk, I stepped away slightly from the day-to-day coding and focused more on making the teams work. I was assigned two scrum teams using Jira to manage their work. One of the teams had been identified as a "failing team". I quickly identified that the team were, in fact, great! But the user stories they had were much too big and poorly defined. Once we fixed the problem with the stories, the teams really began to fly!

During the summer Maersk experienced a big, public cyberattack which left large numbers of staff unable to work for weeks. At this time, I was asked to provide training in scrum internally to teams. I delivered two "Introduction to Scrum" training courses - half day courses which raced through the materials at a frightening rate!

In the autumn, I travelled to Maersk India to conduct workshops with Product Owners to introduce them to the Product Backlog and story writing. At the end of the week we had the beginnings of a backlog and span up a new team a week later (resulting in the most productive Sprint 0 of my career). The team had worked together for a long time, just the scrum ideas were new, and they loved it and ran with it. Introducing the Maersk India team to scrum was two of the most joyful weeks of my career. 

As is the way with contracting, when the end of the financial year looms, companies scale down resources. My work was done, in that my teams were viewed as high-performers, and therefore handed off to someone else and I sadly said goodbye. 

Through all of the fun, learning and experience, I'd never attended an "official" scrum training course. I'd had a few internal training courses and learned an enormous amount from the scrum masters caring for teams I'd worked in, but nothing formalised. Now seems like the perfect time to get "street legal" - attend the training courses and get the certifications to back up my experience. The first one (CPO) finished yesterday and although training materials were familiar to me, the trainer had so much real world experience and knowledge that I left feeling much wiser than I went in. It was also fascinating to hear all the other places where the course delegates came from and how they expected to use scrum.

Now I'm really looking forward to continuing with LeSS and CSM courses planned for the next two weeks....