Parneet Kaur

Parneet Kaur I have been actively engaged in scrum teams as team member, scrum master and occasionally product owner since 2007. I started my carrier with a software consultancy company in India in 2006 that was dealing with software development for customers in USA. And back in those days Waterfall appeared to be best suited. But the project that was running for three years was getting nowhere.By the time something was developed, world had already moved on. In 2007, after many discussions in team and with my role as Quality analyst and part-time Business analyst (similar to PO), I together with my team started to experiment and convinced Chief Business analyst to be more engaged with customer (simply by asking questions). Things didn't happen all of a sudden. But eventually, we started to see the difference. Back on those days we didn't had Scrumworks or Jira, but the concept of self organising teams started to work :). We were quick, fast, adaptable and responsive to change, as soon as Push mechanism got changed to Pull mechanism and Business value became a culture for our Analyst. Since, then I started to get my belief more strong in Agile methodologies. From there on each assignment added more to the experience and taught lessons. From software offshore teams to manufacturing domains, one thing that became really clear to me is that no team leader, manager, ..super-man can match what a self organising motivated team can achieve, if goals are set clear. There has been a lot of challenges to hold on agile mindset in different cultures, geographical locations and teams but eventually when companies see raised velocity and get right things at right time then they value it. Team members are also happy since, they don't have to struggle with multiple important things at same time. From last five years now, I am working in Sweden and the journey goes on. Each day is a learning experience, we evolve, experiment, fail , learn and win. At present, I am a scrum master for a software team that has a lot of dependencies with multiple teams at multiple locations. When we started we have had bad days where our sprint planning crashed because other team changed their plan. Best thing with Scrum is that it revels problems that are otherwise hidden. We discovered problem and then improved synchronisation and other teams also started to value planning and communication more than ever before. Our Product owner is now more available. I help my team by motivating them and by helping remove the impediments. I shield them but try to balance the disturbances. My team is aware of what is happening around but are not disturbed. We are not perfect, but we are willing to change and improve. We consider and value retrospectives and always plan to work on improvements every sprint. We also leave a room for unplanned support in our planning. And when we don't get support and are left with time, team happily improves code, educate themselves or prepare themselves for upcoming sprint. Testing is an integral part of my team but we are struggling with other teams to pick the same. It is challenging but not impossible to build cross functional teams with T-shaped members. So, my journey together with my team continues...