Scrum has proven time and again to be the most popular framework for software development. Given that software is eating the world, a seasoned Scrum Master is nowadays in high demand. And that demand causes the market entry of new professionals from other project management branches, probably believing that reading one or two Scrum books will be sufficient. Which makes any Scrum Master interview a challenging task. A good starting point, though, is to ask a candidate to walk in the shoes of an imaginary opponent trying to make the Scrum Master fail by culturally accepted means.
Suppose you are looking to fill a Scrum Master (or agile coach) position in your organization. In that case, you may find the following interview questions helpful to identify the right candidate. They are derived from my sixteen years of practical experience with XP and Scrum, serving both as Product Owner and Scrum Master, and my training experience as a Professional Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org. Also, I have interviewed dozens of Scrum Master candidates on behalf of my clients.
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The ebook provides both questions as well as guidance on the range of suitable answers. These should allow an interviewer to deep dive into a candidate’s understanding of Scrum and her agile mindset. However, please note that:
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Scrum Masters will be more successful once they understand that not everyone in the organization is enthusiastic about becoming “agile.” Resistance in some form or shape is inevitable for the following reasons:
Here is the briefing for the candidate that applies to all of the following six questions:
You are a middle manager in the IT organization, and you believe this Scrum thingy is a fad and will go away—with a little help from your side.
Come up with ideas on how to best sabotage the new Scrum Master of the first Scrum Team in your organization. You’re not allowed to use any form of illegal activity. So, outsourcing the task to a bunch of outlaws is out of the question. Instead, you are only allowed to use practices that are culturally acceptable within your organization.
Please find following questions from the “How to Make Your Scrum Master Fail” chapter to identify suitable candidates for the role of Scrum Master or agile coach:
How can you mess with the Scrum framework itself?
The first category of how to best sabotage a Scrum Master is generally about disqualifying Scrum itself as a helpful framework or introducing changes to conflict with the first principles of Scrum. Effective examples are:
How can you use excessive reporting requirements or unsuited metrics to pursue your agenda?
The next bucket of useful sabotage practices are metrics, OKRs, KPIs — you name it. Just turn your Scrum Master into a glorified data-entry clerk with a challenging reporting burden. Successful approaches are:
How can you interfere with the team building by utilizing your line management prerogatives?
If a challenging reporting burden does not help, sabotage your Scrum Master by actively undermining their activities to turn a group of people into a cross-functional Scrum Team. Examples to consider are:
How can impede the Scrum team’s self-management and work organization?
If you are already messing with the Scrum Team team-building process, why not place a few obstacles into the Scrum Team’s way of working? Sabotage your Scrum Master by creating unachievable objectives while meddling with the very foundation of Scrum:
How can you manipulate the flow of information to the Scrum team?
Does your Scrum Master have an insatiable appetite for data, information, and knowledge? Well, keep them out of the loop then. What could be an easier way of sabotaging Scrum:
How can you use other events and meetings to make planning and communication harder for the Scrum team?
Finally, ensure that everyone on the Scrum Team understands that your events are more important than theirs:
Scrum has always been a hands-on business, and to be successful in this, a candidate needs to have a passion for getting her hands dirty. While the basic rules are trivial, getting a group of individuals with different backgrounds, levels of engagement, and personal agendas to form and perform as a team, is a complex task. (As always you might say when humans and communication are involved.) And the larger the organization is, the more management levels there are, the more likely failure is lurking around the corner.
The questions are not necessarily suited to turn an inexperienced interviewer into an agile expert. But in the hands of a seasoned practitioner, they support figuring out, what candidate has been working the agile trenches in the past.
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