TL; DR: Scrum Mastery

How to make Scrum work? Read on to learn more about my top three objectives for Scrum Masters striving to achieve Scrum Mastery.

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The Top Three Objectives

Achieving Scrum Mastery is no rocket-science: Make sure that the Scrum Team delivers a valuable, potentially shippable Product Increment every single Sprint with the precision of a Swiss clockwork. Delivering at this level builds a happy customer base, trust within the organization as well as high morale among the team members. To do so, focus your activities on three objectives:

1. Defend the Product Backlog tooth and nail to ensure it represents the best possible use of the Development Team’s work from a customer value perspective at any given moment—garbage in, garbage out. In other words, your Scrum Team’s Product Backlog has to be actionable 24/7. By my standards for Scrum Mastery, that means that you need to be capable of running a meaningful Sprint Planning instantly.
2. Keep technical debt at bay from day #1: Make sure that the Development Team members are embracing Xtreme Programming techniques from TDD, pair programming, relentless refactoring to supporting an emergent architecture from the start. Also, fight for their Slack time—at least 20% of their theoretical capacity—uncompromisingly. Pay serious attention to the concept of ‘Done,’ as represented in the Definition of Done.
3. Support the middle management by educating them on how to become servant leaders, thus alleviating their fear of obsolescence. If the ability to pay for a mortgage is no longer an issue, personal agendas, managers might harbor, will be overcome, and we can address the necessary change within the organization collaboratively.

Of course, as so often, the devil is in the details. What are your top three picks to achieve Scrum Mastery? Please share them with us in the comments.

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