Traditional Organization and Agile Organization
1. Differences Between Traditional Project Manager and Scrum Master
- The role of the traditional project manager is the leader, decision-maker, and planner of the project. He is the person responsible for achieving the business goals of the project. The Scrum Master plays the role of coach, leader, and trainer. He is responsible for the normal implementation and execution of the Scrum process in the team.
- The traditional project manager is responsible for the division of specific tasks of team members, while Scrum emphasizes the self-organization and self-management of the team. The very important content of the Scrum Master is to help everyone improve their ability and is not responsible for the actual work content.
2. Differences Between Traditional Organization and Agile Organization
a. Traditional organization
Managers strive to “control” the team
Make a detailed work plan and make a detailed work arrangement
Monitoring the process of mandatory working mode
Management based on complex rules
b. Agile organization
Managers strive to “inspire” the team
Through the goal to lead the team to work independently
Help the team to provide resources and remove obstacles
Create a self-management working atmosphere for the team as a coach to guide the progress of the team
Management based on simple principles, which are simple but must be observed
3. Suggestions for Scrum Master
Although many Scrum Masters started as developers, they are two completely different positions. In my opinion, Scrum Master is more inclined to technology management, which is more challenging. Therefore, Scrum Master’s job can better train a person, especially in communication skills and time management. Let’s talk about it in detail.
a. Improve communication skills
When developing software, you only need to communicate with the product manager, tester, and other people. But ScrumMaster is different, he needs to deal with all kinds of people. Within the team, Scrum master should communicate with the product manager, development, tester, and other personnel in the development process. Outside the team, Scrum master should consider the cooperation with other teams and the achievement presentation for the management. At the same time, in addition to organizing meetings within the team, Scrum master also participates in various meetings in the company.
So communication skills are very important. Especially when communicating with external members of the team, you are not only representing yourself but the entire team. The impression of others on you largely represents the impression of the entire team. What should be said, what should not be said, and even what should be said, are much more difficult than writing the code during development.
In contrast, the developer is generally busy with technology, and every day’s work is dealing with computers, so many times the conversation is straightforward. If it is a purely technical discussion between developers, there is no problem. However, it is easy to offend people if you are a Scrum Master and still use this way of communication. Therefore, it is particularly important for the Scrum Master to master the skills of communicating with others.
b. Time management
In terms of time, one obvious difference between being a Scrum Master and being a developer is time fragmentation. When you are a developer, you can focus on the realization of a function throughout the morning or afternoon. When you are a ScrumMaster, you have all kinds of things to deal with, and what you are doing may be interrupted at any time.
A keyword in multi-threaded development is needed at this time: priority. Our brains are similar to single-core CPUs, so there is no real parallelism. Therefore, when there are many things that need to be dealt with, these things to be dealt with must be prioritized. Do it in the order of priority, and make good use of the fragmented time period. This is extremely similar to thread scheduling.
c. Change your perspective
When doing development, you only focus on the realization of a function. Sometimes it’s more specific about how to write an efficient function. But to be a ScrumMaster, we need to look at the problem from the perspective of the product. We must have an overall view and be able to properly control the direction of the product (Of course, we need to communicate well with the product manager). Once again, it shows the importance of communication.
In particular, we can’t do it according to the idea of the developers, but according to the needs of the products (the needs of the customers). At this time, we must persuade the developers, so as not to make things that do not meet the requirements and rework them (when communication skills are needed).
d. Don’t give up development work
In addition, don’t give up on the development work. When you become a scrum master, all kinds of things will take up a lot of your time, but be sure to take the time to continue to do the development work. In order not to affect the development progress, we can do some low priority tasks. The communication skills and time management mentioned above are all soft power. Development ability is the real hard power. The combination of soft power and hard power will greatly help your career development.
Keywords: Traditional Project Manager, Scrum Master, Suggestions for Scrum Master, Scrum, Project Manager, Team Management, Agile, Team Leader, Agile Organization, Time Management, Communication Skill, Career, Self- Management.
