Serena Caruso

Serena Caruso

Every Agilist has at some point felt like embodying at least one of the Agile manifesto principle. My inspiration in my Agile path has always been ”Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” and that core principle has become my mantra as Scrum Master. After my BSc and MSc in Software Engineering, I’ve started my professional career as developer with exposure to different languages, platform and technologies. Worked for several years in the gaming industry across 2 different companies, until the word Agile and Scrum started to become popular and people started to know or pretend to know about it. I got soon interested, I was lucky enough to have a great mentor who really believed in the Agile Manifesto and had experience with Scrum teams (the newly hired Head of Web Department), I read a few books, and I simply started implementing some of the basic principles with my peers. Ironically I was at that time in charge for some of our tools configuration and customisation, and that mantra became my mission. My first step as newbie agilist was preventing the tools from getting in the way and help bending them to get devs to work better as a team, to get devs and tester working on the same backlog and at the same time, to become more and more cross skills and to expose the backlog. Simple things, but that meant a revolution in the context we used to work. Soon enough, I was scrum master for our 4 web development teams. A massive first challenge, but that got me hooked and gave me plenty of motivation. I took charge of the training, running sessions for Product Owner (designed by myself) and for the rest of the business. After a year wearing the scrum master hat and after taking my SM certification, I left the gaming industry to land in the world of the big corporates: new environment, different issues, different challenges, plenty to learn. I was Scrum Master for 2 teams, and enjoyed the presence of an Agile community in the company, which massively helped me to share and learn practises and to improve my communication and coaching skills. In 2015 I took a different turn accepting a consultant contract at the BBC, although back to a more hands on role, as a team leader for their administration tools team, I had a chance to bring my agile experience and put in place a continuous improvement process, applying a Kanban process to the team and improve the communication with the other teams. I trained our stakeholders to write their user stories in a different way, shifting the focus from the solution to the actual problem (and leaving the solution space to the team). Quickly, the reputation of our team turned from the one of a team which used to be very unhelpful and to reject any requests (because they were always requests for silly "solutions" with unclear purpose), to the most helpful team that everyone was very happy about it. Last but not least, I got exposure to yet another completely different environment and extended my experience as change agent. At the end of this contract, I came back to a Scrum Master role in Cambridge (my current role), in a company recently acquired by a big American brand and still going through an Agile adoption process, within a scaled framework. Yet another new adventure I couldn’t miss to learn from.